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Unorthodox bubbles when boiling in cold water

Scott Parker and Steve Granick
Phys. Rev. E 89, 013011 – Published 15 January 2014
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Abstract

High-speed movies are taken when bubbles grow at gold surfaces heated spotwise with a near-infrared laser beam heating water below the boiling point (60–70 °C) with heating powers spanning the range from very low to so high that water fails to rewet the surface after bubbles detach. Roughly half the bubbles are conventional: They grow symmetrically through evaporation until buoyancy lifts them away. Others have unorthodox shapes and appear to contribute disproportionately to heat transfer efficiency: mushroom cloud shapes, violently explosive bubbles, and cavitation events, probably stimulated by a combination of superheating, convection, turbulence, and surface dewetting during the initial bubble growth. Moreover, bubbles often follow one another in complex sequences, often beginning with an unorthodox bubble that stirs the water, followed by several conventional bubbles. This large dataset is analyzed and discussed with emphasis on how explosive phenomena such as cavitation induce discrepancies from classical expectations about boiling.

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  • Received 26 September 2013
  • Revised 3 December 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.89.013011

©2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Scott Parker1 and Steve Granick1,2

  • 1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA
  • 2Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA

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Issue

Vol. 89, Iss. 1 — January 2014

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