How the Physics of Champagne Will Improve Power Plants

​Tonight, champagne corks will be popping across the world as revelers ring in the new year. As Jason Koebler pointed out last year, breaking out the bubbly isn't just a festive tradition, it's also a display of some spectacularly combustive physics at work. In fact, according to a new study in The Journal of Chemical Physics, a better understanding of champagne and soda bubbles may lead to several real world like advances, including more efficient power production.

The study was authored by researchers from the University of Tokyo, Kyusyu University, and the RIKEN supercomputer center, and it focused on a phenomenon known as Ostwald ripening. When a champagne cork is popped, the sudden decrease in liquid pressure sparks rapid bubble formation. Larger bubbles quickly begin forming at the expense of smaller ones, and it's this state of nonequilibrium that characterizes Ostwald ripening. The phenomenon occurs in champagne and soda bottles on a small scale, but it's also observed in more macro environments, like power plant boilers.

However, despite the ubiquity of Ostwald ripening, its molecular dynamics have never been modeled in much detail, so that's exactly what the researchers set out to do. "We want to understand the behavior of bubbles without any assumptions, except for the interaction between molecules," study co-author Hiroshi Watanabe told me over email.

"However, there is a huge gap in scale between the molecular level and macroscopic behavior," he continued. "If we assume the behavior of bubbles, […] then we do not require huge computational power. But we want to investigate the assumptions themselves. This is why huge computational power is required."

Watanabe and his colleagues used the K computer at RIKEN—Japan's most powerful supercomputer—to achieve this exhaustive model of bubble mechanics. The computer ran parallel simulations using 4,000 processors, representing a total of 700 million particles over a million time steps. It's the first time the molecular mechanics of Ostwald ripening have been investigated with such precision.

Hiroshi Watanabe presenting the team's research at Blue Waters Symposium. Credit: ​NCSAatIllino​is/YouTube.

The team's key discovery was that the classical explanation of bubble formation, known as the LSW theory, holds up, despite evidence to the contrary. But the simulation also lays the groundwork for improving energy efficiency by optimizing Ostwald ripening in industrial equipment.

"In engineering, bubbles are usually the villain," Watanabe explained. "When bubbles appear on the inner surface of piping, the efficiency of heat exchange decreases drastically. Therefore, it is very important how bubbles appear when the piping is heated up."

The problem is that bubbles are incredibly small when they first form, on the order of nanometers and microns, compared to the centimeter scale industrial piping. "The huge separation between the sizes of bubbles and the device make investigations difficult, and no one knows how bubbles appear in the piping accurately," said Watanabe.

That's why these supercomputer simulations are so important, though Watanabe emphasized that researchers are still in the early stages of figuring out the intricacies of bubble mechanics. "Honestly speaking, our present study is quite fundamental and it cannot be applicable to improve the efficiency of real devices right now," he told me. "But this is the first step to understand how bubbles appear and how bubbles interact each other during the bubble formation from the molecular level."

"We believe that the understanding the behavior of bubbles at the molecular level will help us to improve efficiency of many kinds of devices in the near future," he added. So when you pop the cork to welcome in 2015 this evening, take a moment to admire the Ostwald ripening effect in action. The same complex physics that generate that frothy flow of bubbles may one day be tweaked to help manage the world's power needs. Cheers to that.