Axisymmetric fountains in stratified environments rise until reaching a maximum height, where the vertical momentum vanishes, and then falls and spread radially as an annular plume following a well-known top-hat profile. Here, firstly, we generalize the model of Morton et al. (Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A textbf{234}, 1, 1956), in order to correctly determine the dependence of the maximum height and the spreading height with the parameters involved. We obtain the critical conditions for the collapse of the fountain, textit i.e. when the jet falls up to the source level, and show that the spreading height must be expressed as a function of at least two parameters. To improve the quantitative agreement with the experiments we modify the criterion to take the mixing process in the down flow into account. Numerical simulations were implemented to estimate the parameter values that characterizes this merging. We show that our generalized model agrees very well with the experimental measurements.
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