The circulation produced in a drop by an electric field: A high field strength electrokinetic model

The circulation produced in a drop by an electric field is examined. Here the leaky dielectric, used in the prototypal solution of Sir Geoffrey Taylor, is replaced with an electrokinetic model of the charge transport. Singular perturbation methods are employed to obtain a description of the macroscopic response of the drop to the field. The remarkable result is that complete agreement is found between the predictions of the two models. Previously, it was thought that effects due to space‐charge accumulation at the drop surface, which had presumably been omitted from the leaky dielectric, explained extant discrepancies between theory and experiment. The electrokinetic model shows that, in an aggregate sense, the leaky dielectric accounts for the space charge, and, so, the differences with the data remain unexplained.