Dripping, jetting and tip streaming have been studied up to a certain point separately by both fluid mechanics and microfluidics communities, the former focusing on fundamental aspects while the latter on applications. Here, we intend to review this field from a global perspective by considering and linking the two sides of the problem. First, we present the theoretical model used to study interfacial flows arising in droplet-based microfluidics, paying attention to three elements commonly present in applications: viscoelasticity, electric fields and surfactants. We review both classical and current results of the stability of jets affected by these elements. Mechanisms leading to the breakup of jets to produce drops are reviewed as well, including some recent advances in this field. We also consider the relatively scarce theoretical studies on the emergence and stability of tip streaming in open systems. Second, we focus on axisymmetric microfluidic configurations which can operate on the dripping and jetting modes either in a direct (standard) way or via tip streaming. We present the dimensionless parameters characterizing these configurations, the scaling laws which allow predicting the size of the resulting droplets and bubbles, as well as those delimiting the parameter windows where tip streaming can be found. Special attention is paid to electrospray and flow focusing, two of the techniques more frequently used in continuous drop production microfluidics. We aim to connect experimental observations described in this section of topics with fundamental and general aspects described in the first part of the review. This work closes with some prospects at both fundamental and practical levels.

Capillary cone jets are natural microfluidic structures arising in steady capillary tip streaming, whose paradigms are electrospray and flow focusing phenomena. In this work, we make a profound revision of the basic underlying physics of generic cone jets from thousands of experimental measurements, most of them reported in the literature. First, the boundaries of the stability region of steady jetting are calculated. We describe these limitations by instability mechanisms associated with the local flow structure in the tip and the issuing jet and with the global behavior of the meniscus. Second, to undertake a general physical treatment of cone jets in steady regime, we analyze the energy balance taking place in the tips of both flow focusing and electrospray. This analysis yields a fundamental result: if the electrospray data are expressed in terms of an effective pressure drop, both phenomena satisfy the same scaling law for the droplet size, which exhibits nearly complete similarity in the parameter window where quasimonodisperse sprays are produced. That effective pressure drop is a function of the liquid properties exclusively, i.e., it does not depend on the operational parameters (flow rate and applied voltage). Moreover, the stability limits of the operational regimes are analyzed in detail, finding fundamental coincidences between flow focusing and electrospray as well. These results provide most useful general description and predictive scaling laws for nearly monodisperse microspraying or nanospraying based on steady cone jets, of immediate applicability in analytical chemistry, chemical engineering, biochemistry, pharmaceutical and food technologies, painting, and many other technological fields.

We present a robust and computationally efficient numerical scheme for simulating steady electrohydrodynamic atomization processes (electrospray). The main simplification assumed in this scheme is that all the free electrical charges are distributed over the interface. A comparison of the results with those calculated with a volume-of-fluid method showed that the numerical scheme presented here accurately describes the flow pattern within the entire liquid domain. Experiments were performed to partially validate the numerical predictions. The simulations reproduced accurately the experimental shape of the liquid cone jet, providing correct values of the emitted electric current even for configurations very close to the cone-jet stability limit.