Dispersion of droplets in an emulsion is commonly seen in several chemical, pharmaceutical and petroleum industries. Electric field has been shown to affect the stability of these dispersions. We study the dynamics of a pair of leaky dielectric droplets in a leaky dielectric liquid in the presence of an externally applied electric field. A pair of droplets may coalesce or repel each other in the presence of an electric field. Interactions between a pair of drops have been shown to be governed by the ratio $\varepsilon _r/\sigma _r$, where $\varepsilon _r$ and $\sigma _r$ are the ratios of drop to ambient fluid electric permittivities and conductivities, respectively. When inertia is neglected, the droplets approach each other if $\varepsilon _r/\sigma _r > 1$, whereas droplets repel when $\varepsilon _r/\sigma _r < 1$. However, inclusion of inertia permits interesting transient behaviour, where the droplets may attract due to the electrostatic dipole–dipole attraction even for $\varepsilon _r/\sigma _r < 1$. The approach velocity then is governed by the electrostatic forces and varies as $1/h^4$, where $h$ is the separation distance between the droplets, in contrast to being hydrodynamically driven as predicted in the Stokes flow limit by Baygents et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 368, 1998, pp. 359–375). For compound droplets, interactions between droplets are essentially governed by the electrical properties of the outer droplet and the ambient fluid. However, transient dynamics may also result in the breakup of a compound droplet and lead to formation of single droplets.

This paper presents a microwave absorber with dual absorption bandwidth response based upon the direction of electromagnetic wave incident on the surface. The design unit cell comprises a staircase shape metallic patch on the top plane and an array of 2×2 meander square ring shape dual layer frequency selective surfaces (FSS) in the middle and bottom planes. The relative absorption bandwidth (RAB) of 39.40% (5 GHz) with more than 90% absorption of incident wave power is achieved when an electromagnetic wave impinges normally on the top plane making it suitable for wideband applications in the X and Ku bands. For the wave incident normally on the bottom plane, the same structure gives narrow band absorption with an RAB of 2.29% (260 MHz) for more than 90% absorption around 11 GHz. Thus, this bi-directional ability of the proposed design is found to be suitable for radar absorbing material, multi-bandwidth, and diverse applications. The absorption performance is also studied for different values of incident angle. The distribution of surface currents on the staircase patch and on the two FSS layers at resonant frequencies of 11 GHz and 14 GHz is analyzed to elaborate the absorption phenomenon physically. The prototype of this design is fabricated and the experimental results are found to be closely following the simulated one.