On a sunny weekend, nothing beats relaxing near the beach with waves crashing or a bonfire blazing. Even the sound of steam from a boiling kettle can add to our environment’s aerosols. Although some aerosols aren’t harmful, industrial sources and even things like sea spray and dust can cause damage to the earth and make people sick.
An aerosol is made up of small liquid or powdery bits that float in the air. They are usually created when bubbles break apart at the water’s edge. Scientists have mostly studied clean bubbles and not contaminated ones, even though it’s more common for this to happen.
Scientists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have discovered that bubbles covered with a thin layer of oil create smaller drops and are sent out at faster speeds than bubbles made in plain water. Their research was recently published in Nature Physics.
Aerosols are everywhere in the environment and may either be natural or man-made. Bubble-bursting aerosols have a major impact on how mass moves across liquid. As an example, sea spray aerosols that form from the ocean surface when bubbles explode. These drops affect air pollution, our climate and even the spread of diseases. Drop size is also important because it shows us how long they can stay in the atmosphere – small drops can move longer distances with the help of winds.
Feng said that contamination of water is a major problem. When air bubbles travel up from the deeper parts of the ocean and reach the surface, they collect harmful particles around them to form what we call contaminated bubbles. These bubbles then burst, spraying bacteria and other small particles into the air like a fine mist.
Feng and Yang looked at how an ultra-thin layer of oil can affect the size and speed of bursting bubbles, as an example of what happens to bubbles with contamination. Generally, when a bubble about a millimeter wide bursts on a water surface, it creates droplets that are around 100 micrometers (µm) in size (remember that a normal human hair is around 100-200 µm). They found that the droplets from oil-coated bubbles were much smaller than those from regular bubbles – only a few µm! Furthermore, the droplets released from normal bubbles travel at 1 meter per second (m/s), but for oil coated ones, they travel up to 10 m/s. To summarize it in simpler terms: their research showed that any kind of contaminants found inside a bubble can be aerosolized into tiny droplets when these bubbles are covered by oil.
In factories that treat wastewater, tiny drops of contamination can be very dangerous. When the droplets burst, they create a mix of acids and germs which can float around in the air. It’s important to understand how these bubbles move and spread so workers can wear protective clothing and make sure the atmosphere around the plant is safe.
Aerosols can make a big difference in our environment. They can impact the weather, climate and even how healthy people are.
Yang said that tiny droplets of water, like rain or damp air, can carry harmful germs, bacteria and viruses. These little droplets can stay in the air longer because they are so small and get ejected out faster from whatever surface they land on. It’s important we learn more about their size and shape so we can improve global modelling efforts. It’s also more likely that these drops filled with germs could cause infections if they penetrate deeper into someone’s lungs.
This passage is from a scientific article written by Zhengyu Yang, Bingqiang Ji, Jesse T. Ault and Jie Feng in 2023 called Enhanced Singular Jet Formation in Oil-Coated Bubble Bursting. It contains info about the principles of aerosol physics related to bioaerosols, reactive inkjet printing and Earth’s atmosphere.
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