Champagne has to be one of the most popular and festive drinks in the world. Everybody likes to pop a bottle of champagne and enjoy its bubble taste. But have you ever been curious about the science behind the champagne bubbles?
A team of researchers from the University Kyukyu in Japan have, and found out whats happening inside the champagne bottle.
When uncorking a champagne bottle the pressure builds extremely fast and the liquid rapidly evacuates the bottle, allowing bubbles to form and grow increasingly in a fundamental non equilibrium process which is known as “Ostwald ripening”. This phenomenon is a widely observed happening and can be found in different in bubbly beverages or systems such as: spin systems or metallic alloys.
For example, most of the power stations need a boiler for transforming water into steam. But the process is very complex and scientist haven’t yet been able to completely understand at which rate bubbles form inside.
Thanks to an ultra performing computer, called RIKEN, the most powerful computer in Japan, researchers have managed to understand Ostwald ripening and have been able to simulate the creation of bubbles.
Newton’s law of motion has been used during this the study. The researchers have put virtual molecules in a container and each was assigned an initial velocity and were put under observation. It was studied the movement of each molecule.
“A huge number of molecules, however, are necessary to simulate bubbles — on the order of 10,000 are required to express a bubble,”. “So we needed at least this many to investigate hundreds of millions of molecules — a feat not possible on a single computer.”
researcher Hiroshi Watanabe explained in a press release
In the end researchers were able to simulate an incredible amount of 700 particles. this was accomplished thanks to the powerful computer, trough a process in which its 4,000 processors have been able to perform parallel simulations.
This scientific breakthrough has been a surprise for everybody, as researchers weren’t expecting this positive result:
“While the nucleation rate of droplets in condensation is well predicted by the classical theory, the nucleation rates of bubbles in a superheated liquid predicted by the theory are markedly different from the values observed in experiments. So we were expecting the classical theory to fail to describe the bubble systems, but were surprised to find that it held up.”
added Hiroshi Watanabe
The success of this project and the understanding of the behavior of the bubbles, may be very helpful for engineers in designing more efficient and evolved turbines.
Image Source: Fast co Design
