Insights into how minute, yet powerful, bubbles form and collapse on underwater surfaces could help make industrial structures such as ship propellers more hardwearing, research suggests.
Jul 31, 2019
Nanobubbles hold clue to improved industrial structures
(Nanowerk News) Supercomputer calculations have revealed details of the growth of so-called nanobubbles, which are tens of thousands of times smaller than a pin head.
The findings (Langmuir, "Mechanical Stability of Surface Nanobubbles") could lend valuable insight into damage caused on industrial structures, such as pump components, when these bubbles burst to release tiny but powerful jets of liquid.
Computer simulations
This rapid expansion and collapse of bubbles, known as cavitation, is a common problem in engineering but is not well understood.
Engineers at Edinburgh devised complex simulations of air bubbles in water, using the UKs national supercomputer.
The team modelled the motion of atoms in the bubbles and observed how they grew in response to small drops in water pressure.
They were able to determine the critical pressure needed for bubble growth to become unstable, and found that this was much lower than suggested by theory.
Bubble dynamics
Their findings could inform the development of nanotechnologies to harness the power of thousands of jets from collapsing nanobubbles, such as therapies to target some cancers, or for cleaning high-precision technical equipment.
Researchers have proposed an updated theory on the stability of surface nanobubbles, based on their findings.
Source: University of Edinburgh
addthis_logo = 'https://www.nanowerk.com/images/nwlogo200x50.gif';
addthis_logo_background = 'FFFFFF';
addthis_logo_color = '000066';
addthis_brand = 'Nanowerk';
addthis_options = 'favorites, delicious, tumblr, stumbleupon, google, live, more';
Subscribe to a free copy of one of our dailyNanowerk Newsletter Email Digests
with a compilation of all of the day's news.
