bubbles

Collapsing Bubbles

Feb 2000

When a bubble of air rises to the top of a highly viscous liquid, it forms a dome-shaped protuberance on the free surface. Unlike a soap bubble, it bursts so slowly as to collapse under its own weight simultaneously, and folds into a wavy structure. This rippling effect occurs for both elastic and viscous sheets, and a theory for its onset is formulated. The growth of the corrugation is governed by the competition between gravitational and bending (shearing) forces and is exhibited for a range of densities, stiffnesses (viscosities), and sizes—a result that arises less from dynamics than from geometry, suggesting a wide validity. A quantitative expression for the number of ripples is presented, together with experimental results that support the theoretical predictions.

Learn more.

Related Publications

Rippling instability of a collapsing Bubble,  da Silveira, R., S. Chaieb and L. Mahadevan,  Science , 287, 1468-71, 2000. [View PDF] [Download PDF]
Wrinkling instability of an inhomogeneously stretched viscous sheet S. Srinivasan, Z. Wei, L. Mahadevan,  Physical Review Fluids  2, 074103, 2017. [View PDF] [Download PDF]
Buckling of a thin-layer Couette flow
A. Slim, J. Teichman, L. Mahadevan,  Journal of Fluid Mechanics,  1-24, 2011.  [View PDF] [Download PDF]
Folding of viscous filaments and sheets Skorobogatiy, M., and L. Mahadevan,  Europhysics Letters , 52, 532-38, 2000. [View PDF] [Download PDF]
The viscous catenary Teichman, J. and L. Mahadevan,  Journal of Fluid Mechanics , 478, pp. 71-80, 2003. [View PDF] [Download PDF]
Fluid rope trick investigated Mahadevan, L., W. Ryu, and A.D.T. Samuel,  Nature391, 140, 1998. Corrigendum; ibid., 403, 502, 2000. [View PDF] [Download PDF]