Overcoming Rayleigh Plateau Instabilities: Stabilizing and Destabilizing Liquid Metal Streams via Electrochemical Oxidation

Liquids typically form droplets when exiting a nozzle. Jets – cylindrical streams of fluid—can form transiently at higher fluid velocities, yet interfacial tension rapidly drives jet-breakup into droplets via the Rayleigh-Plateau instability. Liquid metal is an unlikely candidate to form stable jets since it has enormous interfacial tension and low viscosity. We report that electrochemical anodization significantly lowers the effective tension of a stream of metal, transitioning it from droplets to long (long lifetime and length) wires with 100 μm diameters without the need for high velocities. Whereas surface minimization drives Rayleigh-Plateau instabilities, these streams of metal increase in surface area when laid flat upon a surface due to the gravity and low interfacial tension. The ability to tune interfacial tension over at least three orders of magnitude using modest potential (<1 V) enables new approaches for production of metallic structures at room temperature, on-demand fluid-in-fluid structuring, and new tools for studying and controlling fluid behavior.