Capillary retraction of liquid ligaments is well understood for Newtonian fluids, whereas viscoplastic effects remain comparatively unexplored. Here, we consider Herschel-Bulkley fluids, which incorporate both yield stress and shear-rate-dependent viscosity, thereby introducing a spatially varying effective viscosity that is absent in simpler yield-stress models (e.g., Bingham models). We focus on the low-viscosity regime, where droplet detachment in Newtonian fluids is controlled by the end-pinching mechanism. Using fully resolved axisymmetric simulations, we show that viscoplasticity and shear-rate-dependent rheology reorganize the routes by which a retracting ligament may pinch off, escape breakup, or stay motionless due to large yield stress. We identify two distinct routes by which a retracting Herschel-Bulkley ligament can escape end-pinching. In the shear-thickening regime, increased local viscosity during neck thinning leads to larger vorticity detachment from the curved neck, which opposes the capillary singularity. In the strongly shear-thinning regime, reopening is governed by curvature-induced pressure gradients. We show that this latter mechanism persists in the Newtonian limit of vanishing viscosity, yielding a purely inertial-capillary pathway for reopening. While previous Newtonian studies report end-pinching down to Ohnesorge number ${\text{Oh}}_K\approx {10}^{-4}$, suggesting breakup as the asymptotic low-viscosity outcome (Anthony et al. [Phys. Rev. Fluids 4, 093601 (2019)]), our results demonstrate that a purely inertial-capillary reopening mechanism can arise as ${\text{Oh}}_K\to 0$, indicating that end-pinching is not the route in the inviscid limit.

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• Drop breakup
• Surface & interfacial phenomena