Your next cocktail conservation will sound more bubbly with this new scientific insight.
You may have noticed champagne bubbles shoot straight up while other carbonated drinks, like beer or soda, don’t.
The reason why some drinks fizz straight up while others are random is due to the gas bubble’s size and the ingredients in the drink.
Scientists posted a study in the Physical Review Fluids that show how bubbles flow in fluid dynamics.
“This is the type of research that I’ve been working out for years,” said Brown engineering professor Roberto Zenit, who was one of the paper’s authors. “Most people have never seen an ocean seep or an aeration tank but most of them have had a soda, a beer or a glass of Champagne. By talking about Champagne and beer, our master plan is to make people understand that fluid mechanics is important in their daily lives.”
Depending on the drink and its ingredients, the fluid mechanics involved are all different.
When it comes to champagne and sparkling wine, for instance, the gas bubbles that continuously appear rise rapidly to the top in a single-file line and keep doing so for some time. This is known as a stable bubble chain.
With other carbonated drinks, like beer, many bubbles veer off to the side, making it look like multiple bubbles are coming up at once.
This means the bubble chain isn’t stable.
Oil on a garage door makes it roll smoothly. Likewise, substances in a liquid called surfactants reduce the surface tension of the liquid allowing bubbles to flow in a straight stable chain as they degass vertically.
The results of their experiments indicate that the stable bubble chains in champagne and other sparkling wines occur due to ingredients that act as soap-like compounds called surfactants that help gas bubbles rise to the top smoothly.
Large bubbles also rise smoothly in stable chains but have less impact on drinks because of their small volume size.
The results of the new study go well beyond understanding the science that goes into celebratory toasts, the researchers said.
Studying bubbly flows have economic and societal value including aeration tank efficiency at water treatment facilities and analyzing deep ocean seeps.