68th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (November 22, 2015 — November 24, 2015)

V0087: The merger of a bubble and a soap film

Authors

• Daniel M. Harris, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Giuseppe Pucci, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Victor Prost, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Julio Quintela Casal, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• John W. M. Bush, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/APS.DFD.2015.GFM.V0087

We present the results of an experimental investigation of the merger of a soap bubble with a planar soap film. When gently deposited onto a horizontal film, a bubble may interact with the underlying film in such a way as to decrease in size, leaving behind a smaller daughter bubble with approximately half the radius of its progenitor. The process repeats up to three times, with each partial coalescence event occurring over a time scale comparable to the inertial-capillary time. Our results are compared to the coalescence cascade of droplets on a fluid bath.