Gulliver Seminar
ESPCI-PSL
07/06/2021
Rupture of Foam Films and Surface Bubbles
Emmanuelle Rio
Surface bubbles are of crucial interest since they favour the transport of material from the bulk to the
overlying atmosphere through the production of aerosols. This is important for example in climate
models, air pollution studies or in the carbonated beverage industry since the produced aerosols
contain most of the flavour.
The current understanding is that thin films stabilized by surfactants are all the more fragile as they
are thin. The lack of understanding of their thinning dynamics thus prevents the prediction of their
lifetime. A better quantitative description of this thinning necessitates a better understanding of the
liquid flow or drainage but also of evaporation. The latter has indeed been ignored in many theoretical
or experimental studies leading to misinterpretations.
In this seminar, I will show that an automatic stability measurement under controlled atmospheric
humidity allows to collect a large quantity of data and to demonstrate that the film lifetime is indeed
fixed by the thinning through drainage and evaporation. A quantitative description allows to describe
various soapy objects ranging from surface bubbles to giant soap films. It necessitates to take into
account convective evaporation and the impact of marginal regeneration (rising patches, which can be
seen in Fig. 1).
Figure 1 : snapshots of a surface bubble ageing along time. The small patches visible at the interface are called marginal regeneration.
Connect to the seminar : https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83880710317?pwd=dVA5NHB6UXlTM3NsVWh2bzZTMHhEZz09
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