Rupturing bubble

An air bubble on a water-air interface is filmed with a high-speed camera as it pops. After the film retracts, a jet develops, but is too large to break up into drops.

Around the bubble, a ring of daughter bubbles are formed. One of these secondary bubbles pops at t = 56 ms.

.Daughter bubble rupture

When one of the smaller, daughter bubbles ruptures, the higher curvature leads to a sharper jet that propels small aerosol droplets into the atmosphere. Here the droplets are approximately 100 microns in diameter and travel upwards at approximately 5 m/s.

Formation of daughter bubbles

High-speed images from the bottom and side demonstrate that the film folds as it collapses and that the trapped air breaks up into the daughter bubbles.

Viscous bubble collapse

The film of a highly viscous bubble (here, a million times the viscosity of water) does not fold to create pockets of air as it retracts, and therefore no daughter bubbles are observed.

Coalescing Cones

A voltage is place across a pair of water droplets. Depending on the voltage, the drops coalesce or recoil when they contact.

Partial coalescence cascade

Here is an example of a well-documented phenomenon in which a water drop partial coalesces onto a wet surface. The remaining drop follows the same processes setting up a cascade. Eventually the remaining drop is small enough for viscous forces to dominate, ending the cascade.

Liquid Acrobatics

When you blow into a straw at the bottom of a shallow liquid, the gas can excite waves ... and sometimes a stream of droplets.

Submitted to the DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion 2008 - download

Bouncing water drop

Here is a high-speed movie showing the well-documented effect of a water droplet bouncing off of a super-hydrophobic surface.

Rotating Disk

A gycerol droplet fall onto a moving surface. Depending on the speed of the surface, the drops either contact and wets the surface or floats away on a cushion of air.

Submitted to the DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion 2006 - download

Vertical splash

A air bubble trapped in a ethanol droplet impacts a solid surface. In this case a jet is shot upwards.

Submitted to the DFD Gallery of Fluid Motion 2006 - download