An inflating soap bubble captured in extreme detail has revealed how its chaotic interior follows surprisingly predictable patterns. Saptarshi Basu at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and his colleagues blew soap bubbles with air containing droplets of olive oil. They then shined a laser sheet through the bubbles which lit up the olive oil particles, allowing them to record the flow of air with a high-speed camera.
Basu and his team found that, contrary to the chaotic processes that they were expecting, the bubble’s characteristics as it inflated followed predictable patterns. “Surprisingly, we found that there are a lot of scaling laws that you can establish, which takes into account how this bubble grows and how the vortices are formed,” says Basu. “Regardless of what kind of pressure you are inflating it with and how the bubble is actually expanding, there are some universal characteristics of the flow field inside.”
These characteristics, such as the amount of vortices present in a bubble that has been inflated for a certain amount of time, could be used to help understand how the fluid moves inside cells that grow and stretch during movement, such as heart cells that pump fluid around the body, says Basu.
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