Electrical stabilization of dielectric liquid bridges in microgravity

The stability criterion for cylindrical dielectric liquid bridges, subjected to a longitudinal electric field under low gravity conditions is obtained. Two methods have been used to deal with gravity effects. One is the Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, a projection technique that gives the local bifurcation diagrams for a cylindrical liquid bridge as a function of the relevant parameters of the system; the other is a finite element method that allows the computation of the finite amplitude bifurcation diagram of any arbitrary liquid bridge in the parameter space. The theoretical results are compared with new experimental data. Although there remains some indeterminacies in the exact physical value of the interfacial surface tension, the somewhat scattered experimental points lie within the predicted region of the parameter space.<>