Ternary drop collisions

It has been recently proposed to use drop collisions for producing advanced particles or well-defined capsules, or to perform chemical reactions where the merged drops constitute a micro-reactor. For all these promising applications, it is essential to determine whether the merged drops remain stable after the collision, forming a single entity, or if they break up. This topic, widely investigated for binary drop collisions of miscible and immiscible liquid, is quite unexplored for ternary drop collisions. The current study aims to close this gap by experimentally investigating collisions between three equal-sized drops of the same liquid arranged centri-symmetrically. Three drop generators are simultaneously operated to obtain controlled ternary drop collisions. The collision outcomes are observed via photographs and compared to those of binary collisions. Similar to binary collisions, a regime map is built, showing coalescence and bouncing as well as reflexive and stretching separation. Significant differences are observed in the transitions between these regimes.