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Science 25 February 2000:
Vol. 287. no. 5457, pp. 1468 - 1471
DOI: 10.1126/science.287.5457.1468
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Reports

Rippling Instability of a Collapsing Bubble

Rava da Silveira, 1 Sahraoui Chaïeb, 2 L. Mahadevan 2

When a bubble of air rises to the top of a highly viscous liquid, it forms a dome-shaped protuberance on the free surface. Unlike a soap bubble, it bursts so slowly as to collapse under its own weight simultaneously, and folds into a wavy structure. This rippling effect occurs for both elastic and viscous sheets, and a theory for its onset is formulated. The growth of the corrugation is governed by the competition between gravitational and bending (shearing) forces and is exhibited for a range of densities, stiffnesses (viscosities), and sizes--a result that arises less from dynamics than from geometry, suggesting a wide validity. A quantitative expression for the number of ripples is presented, together with experimental results that support the theoretical predictions.

1 Department of Physics,
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
The molecular mechanism of lipid monolayer collapse.
S. Baoukina, L. Monticelli, H. J. Risselada, S. J. Marrink, and D. P. Tieleman (2008)
PNAS 105, 10803-10808
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