When a vertical liquid jet impacts on a solid horizontal surface, the first expectation is to have a circular hydraulic jump. However, in some conditions, for highly viscous fluids, the transition from super-critical to sub-critical flow occurs with non-circular shapes such as polygons. Indeed, a quick rotational wave appears on the circular jump before the formation of a polygonal form, which may be related to the Rayleigh–Plateau instability. In this paper, stable polygonal jumps are studied to complete this research. The region of stability is defined for polygonal jumps, and the dependence of this region on the flow governing dimensionless groups is determined experimentally. The results confirm the multistability (hysteresis) of the polygonal jumps, and imply that polygonal jumps with different corner numbers can be created in a certain parameter regime. The size and curvature of the sides of the polygons due to variations of flow rate and downstream obstacle height are also investigated. In addition to the stable ones, our experiments reveal a new type of polygonal jump that has an unstable structure and displays a rotational behavior with a constant angular velocity, which we call it, ‘rotational hydraulic jump’. It is observed that the angular velocity of this kind of jump depends on the jet flow rate, jet radius and downstream height of the jump. Our observations suggest that the nature of the rotational jump is some kind of surface wave along the jump in clockwise or anticlockwise direction. It seems that the rotational jump has a flow structure that is the same as a type IIb jump. The jump dimensions are studied; the inscribed and circumscribed circular radii of each polygon are measured in order to compare the various polygons together and to find a mean jump radius to compare with Watson’s theory.

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