Surface Nanobubbles Nucleate Microdroplets

Superstability of surface nanobubbles.

Shock wave induced cavitation experiments and atomic force microscopy measurements of flat polyamide and hydrophobized silicon surfaces immersed in water are performed. It is shown that surface nanobubbles, present on these surfaces, do not act as nucleation sites for cavitation bubbles, in contrast to the expectation. This implies that surface nanobubbles are not just stable under ambient cond...

Surface nanobubbles and micropancakes.

Surface nanobubbles or Knudsen bubbles?

The mysterious stability of nanobubbles on surfaces is a puzzle baffling soft matter and colloid scientists. Bubbles inside a fluid tend to be spherical, but surface bubbles have the appearance of blisters with typical widths of 1000 nanometers (nm) and heights of 20 nm. The existence of surface bubbles was proposed to explain the extremely long range and the magnitude of the strongly attractiv...

Effect of Disjoining Pressure on Surface Nanobubbles.

In gas-oversaturated solutions, stable surface nanobubbles can exist thanks to a balance between the Laplace pressure and the gas overpressure, provided the contact line of the bubble is pinned. In this article, we analyze how the disjoining pressure originating from the van der Waals interactions of the liquid and the gas with the surface affects the properties of the surface nanobubbles. From...

Corrigendum: Dynamics of microdroplets over the surface of hot water

When drinking a cup of coffee under the morning sunshine, you may notice white membranes of steam floating on the surface of the hot water. They stay notably close to the surface and appear to almost stick to it. Although the membranes whiffle because of the air flow of rising steam, peculiarly fast splitting events occasionally occur. They resemble cracking to open slits approximately 1 mm wid...