The bioreactor, pharmaceutical companies, and oil industries have one common enemy that makes their functioning harder and less efficient, i.e., bubbles. They can easily form in between the manufacturing of the product or their transportation. Their presence, formation, and subsequent rupture lead to major issues in the quality of different liquids, making them a nightmare for most manufacturers.
To tackle the ongoing problem, a research team undertook a study on the way bubbles form and burst by making use of high-speed cameras and analytical modeling. Their efforts thus revealed a new popping process that wasn’t known to the world before. The study is an innovative way of showcasing the different applications of High – Speed Cameras, boosting the High-Speed Camera Market. Since their use helped the team discover that whenever protein bubbles are popped with a needle, they open up like flowers.
Bubbles can burst in a number of ways, in accordance with their chemical and physical properties. The most important of which is known as viscoelasticity. Most materials present in the environment are neither perfectly liquid (like water and olive oil) nor perfectly elastic (like a pencil eraser). They lie in-between these parameters, and that state is referred to as visco elasticity. The findings in the new study proved that distinct from traditional soap bubbles, visco elastic bubbles consisting of both liquid and solid-like characteristics burst and deform that look just like a blooming flower.
It is impossible to gather the process of bubble forming and to deform through the naked eye. A human would normally only see the bubble vanish. This is why researchers took help from high-speed cameras operating at 20,000 frames/per sec, which is at least 300 times quicker than a human eye. They studied the whole process in this manner and found the bubbles consisting of proteins on the surface-displayed a completely different mechanism during rupture than what was traditionally expected.
Once they had thoroughly examined the flowering phenomenon, the team slowly developed analytical models of the bursting. Through current knowledge available on bubble dynamics and other mathematical models, a set of computational reproductions have been proposed of the bubble flowering with the help of the study.The researchers hope that their continuous research on bubble formation and bursting will eventually lead to developing ways in which their generation and popping can be reduced within real-world conditions. They are optimistic that benefits from their findings will even contribute towards medicine and vaccine production and oil transportation.