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Title    The Physics Behind Building an Enduring Soap Bubble
Date    Thursday January 19 2023, @03:13PM
Author    hubie
Topic   
from the not-so-tiny-bubbles dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=23/01/19/0235245

upstart writes:

Physics models and real-world experiments help keep bubbles from popping:

Blowing soap bubbles, besides being a favorite pastime for children, also happens to be an art form and a subject of interest for physicists. Emmanuelle Rio, François Boulogne, Marina Pasquet, and Frédéric Restagno from the Laboratory of Solid State Physics at the University of Paris-Saclay have been studying bubbles for years, trying to understand the different processes at play in these innocuous-looking structures.

"Bubbles are important as they appear in many places, including washing products, cosmetics, building materials, and also in nature. For example, sea foam plays a role in terms of the exchanges between the atmosphere and the sea," Boulogne said.

Now, the team has described a key event in the life of bubbles: when they pop.

[...] Boulogne stated that although there is a link between temperature and aging of the bubbles, the impact of low temperatures on when the bubbles pop remains to be understood—and is likely to stay that way for a while. "So far, we have no model that can make this prediction. Understanding the stability of bubbles is a challenge that will take several decades," he said.

[...] Working with the French artist Pierre-Yves Fusier, who specializes in bubbles art, Rio and her colleagues developed the recipe, which consists of 40 milliliters of dishwashing liquid, 100 milliliters of glycerol, and 1 gram of long polymer such as the naturally occurring guar gum mixed in 1 liter of water. Using this recipe, Rio created 5 cm-diameter bubbles in her laboratory that lasted an hour.

While adding glycerol may make the bubbles more stable, Rio said the impact of other ingredients on the bubbles' stability is still an open question. "Glycerol is a hydroscopic molecule which can help condensate water. But we know the surfactant (dishwashing liquid) and the polymer also impact evaporation. The next step in our study, therefore, is to find out how our recipe impacts the evaporation," Rio said.

Journal Reference:
Pasquet, M., Wallon, L., Fusier, PY. et al. An optimized recipe for making giant bubbles. Eur. Phys. J. E 45, 101 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-022-00255-6


Original Submission

Links

  1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
  2. "Physics models and real-world experiments help keep bubbles from popping" - https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/the-physics-behind-building-an-enduring-soap-bubble/
  3. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=58232

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printed from SoylentNews, The Physics Behind Building an Enduring Soap Bubble on 2024-03-28 15:29:45