The Shape of a Liquid Drop in the Flow of a Perfect Fluid,

A method of analysis previously used to determine the shape of a liquid drop in an electric field has been applied to determine the shape of a drop in the flow of a perfect fluid. The surface of the drop is expanded in a series of Legendre polynomials with arbitrary coefficients. Minimization of the total energy with respect to the coefficients then gives equations for their determination. Due to the similarity of the equations for determining the coefficients to previous results, it is expected that the shape of the drops will deviate considerably from the usually assumed oblate spheroids. Author