Langmuir, Vol.19, No.14, 5771-5779, 2003
Capillary-driven flower-shaped structures around bubbles collapsing in a bubble raft at the surface of a liquid of low viscosity
By using a classical photo camera and a high-speed video camera, snapshots and time sequences of the dynamics of champagne bubbles collapsing close to each other in a bubble raft composed of quite monodisperse millimetric bubbles were made, thus completing two recent works (Liger-Belair et al. in C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Serie 4 2001, 2, 775-780 and Liger-Belair in Ann. Phys. Fr. 2002, 27 (4), 1-106). Bubble caps of bubbles adjacent to a collapsing one were found to be strikingly stretched toward the lowest part of the cavity left by the central bursting bubble. Orders of magnitude of shear stresses developed in the adjacent deformed bubble caps were indirectly estimated. Our results strongly suggest, in the thin film of adjacent bubble caps, stresses higher than those observed around a single millimetric collapsing bubble. High-speed time sequences also proved that bubble caps in touch with collapsing bubbles were never found to rupture, thus causing in turn a chain reaction. As in the case of single collapsing cavities, it was also observed that a tiny daughter bubble, approximately 10 times smaller than the initial central bursting bubble, was entrapped during the collapsing process of the central cavity.