English

Knudsen gas provides nanobubble stability

Fluid Dynamics 2011-09-09 v1 Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

We provide a model for the remarkable stability of surface nanobubbles to bulk dissolution. The key to the solution is that the gas in a nanobubble is of Knudsen type. This leads to the generation of a bulk liquid flow which effectively forces the diffusive gas to remain local. Our model predicts the presence of a vertical water jet immediately above a nanobubble, with an estimated speed of 3.3m/s\sim3.3\,\mathrm{m/s}, in good agreement with our experimental atomic force microscopy measurement of 2.7m/s\sim2.7\,\mathrm{m/s}. In addition, our model also predicts an upper bound for the size of nanobubbles, which is consistent with the available experimental data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1109.1652,
  title  = {Knudsen gas provides nanobubble stability},
  author = {James Seddon and Harold Zandvliet and Detlef Lohse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.1652},
  year   = {2011}
}
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