Abstract

Electrohydrodynamics, an interdisciplinary subject coupling electrostatic fields into fluid flows through the Maxwell stress tensor, has a wide range of applications in chemistry and industry, including the cooling system, coating process, and microfluidic device. The tangential electric field, parallel to the undisturbed interface, has a stabilizing effect since it provides a dispersive/dissipative contribution to the linear system. It can delay the formation of the film rupture and even suppress the Rayleigh-Taylor instability. This talk focuses on interfacial waves between two dielectrics under tangential electric fields in the inviscid limit, which can be formulated as a Hamiltonian system. Asymptotic modelling based on the Hamiltonian framework, as well as the direct numerical simulations of the primitive equations, are combined to capture the nonlinear features of the system. The tangential electric field leads to a more complicated dispersion relation, and its stabilizing nature expands the range of parameters that can be explored; hence peculiar wave phenomena, particularly new types of solitary waves, are discovered.