Fluctuations in pump performance can cause the flow rate to increase and decrease with no warning, resulting in hysteresis. The researchers' method computes the quickly changing pressure and velocity of fluids in evolving drops. Each drop is broken into rectangular and square-shaped sections. As liquid emerges from a faucet and creates a drop, the changing pressures and velocities in each section are computed. The long-term behavior of drop formation is then simulated by tracking hundreds of consecutive drops at the same flow rate.
Conventional methods take longer because they can study only a single drop at a given flow rate.
That would have taken about 100 days. We figured out a simpler way of doing it that would take us minutes to do one drop, so we can do a few hundred drops in a couple of hours or less. The Purdue engineers not only created the mathematical equations, they backed up their new algorithms with hard data. The researchers used a high-speed camera to capture drops forming and a laser to count drop frequency precisely. We are lucky that we can do both, and I think that's why we are more successful in this work than some other people.