Around this time of year, champagne bubbles are on the minds of many. As Christmas winds down and we approach the New Year, champagne will be a hot topic of discussion.
But a team of researchers at the University of Tokyo, Kyusyu University and RIKEN in Japan, have actually more on the physical properties of the bubbles inside the champagne.
You see, when you uncork a bottle of champagne, the pressure builds very quickly and as the liquid abruptly evacuates its container, bubbles form, growing larger and larger in a fundamental nonequilibrium phenomenon known as “Ostwald ripening.” It is actually a widely observed occurrence, also found in systems including foams, spin systems, and metallic alloys.”
But on a bigger scale, the Ostwald ripening can be observed within a power-generating turbine. For example, most power stations need boilers to convert water into steam, of course. But the phase transition involved with this process is extremely complex, and during that phase transition nobody really knows exactly what is happening inside the boiler, where all the action is.
So that is what the team of researchers set out to discover. They put a bunch of virtual molecules in a container and assigned each of them initial veloceties to observe how they continue moving–using Newton’s law of motion–to determine their individual positions over time. They encountered many challenges in doing this, according to University of Tokyo research scientists Hiroshi Watanabe, of school’s Institute for Solid State Physics.
“A large number of molecules, however, are necessary to simulate bubbles–on the order of 10,000 are required to express a bubble,” explains Watanabe. “So we needed at least this many to investigate hundreds of millions of molecules–a feat not possible on a single computer.”
The team found, in fact, that they had 700 million particles.
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