Displacement of an Electrically Charged Drop on a Vibrating Bath

In this work, the manipulation of an electrically charged droplet bouncing on a vertically vibrated bath is investigated. When a horizontal, uniform, and static electric field is applied to it, a motion is induced. The droplet is accelerated when the droplet is small. On the other hand, large droplets appear to move with a constant speed that depends linearly on the applied electrical field. In the latter regime, high-speed imaging of one bounce reveals that the droplet experiences an acceleration due to the electrical force during the flight and decelerates to 0 when interacting with the surface of the bath. Thus, the droplet moves with a constant average speed on a large time scale. We propose a criterion based on the force necessary to move a charged droplet at the surface of the bath to discriminate between constant speed and accelerated droplet regimes.