Why Surface Nanobubbles Live for Hours

Superstability of surface nanobubbles.

Shock wave induced cavitation experiments and atomic force microscopy measurements of flat polyamide and hydrophobized silicon surfaces immersed in water are performed. It is shown that surface nanobubbles, present on these surfaces, do not act as nucleation sites for cavitation bubbles, in contrast to the expectation. This implies that surface nanobubbles are not just stable under ambient cond...

Surface nanobubbles and micropancakes.

Surface nanobubbles or Knudsen bubbles?

The mysterious stability of nanobubbles on surfaces is a puzzle baffling soft matter and colloid scientists. Bubbles inside a fluid tend to be spherical, but surface bubbles have the appearance of blisters with typical widths of 1000 nanometers (nm) and heights of 20 nm. The existence of surface bubbles was proposed to explain the extremely long range and the magnitude of the strongly attractiv...

Effect of Disjoining Pressure on Surface Nanobubbles.

In gas-oversaturated solutions, stable surface nanobubbles can exist thanks to a balance between the Laplace pressure and the gas overpressure, provided the contact line of the bubble is pinned. In this article, we analyze how the disjoining pressure originating from the van der Waals interactions of the liquid and the gas with the surface affects the properties of the surface nanobubbles. From...

Surface Nanobubbles in Nonaqueous Media: Looking for Nanobubbles in DMSO, Formamide, Propylene Carbonate, Ethylammonium Nitrate, and Propylammonium Nitrate.

Surface nanobubbles produced by supersaturation during the exchange of ethanol for water are routinely observed on hydrophobic surfaces, are stable for days, and have contact angles that are very much greater than observed macroscopically. Here, we test the hypothesis that nanobubbles can also be observed in nonaqueous solvents in order to ascertain if their anomalous lifetimes and contact angl...