The Bursting of Pointed Drops in Slow Viscous Flow

Viscous drops, confined by the slow axisymmetric straining motion of a viscous fluid, are considered when the surface tension is weak. The shape of the drops is determined using slender-body theory, and it is found that steady solutions only exist for sufficiently small drop viscosities. Nonuniqueness exists, with bifurcation from a simple quadratic solution. At high drop viscosities, when there are no steady solutions, a description of the unsteady elongation of shape-preserving drops is obtained. This is the bursting phenomenon described experimentally by Taylor [1].