Pulling bubbles from a bath

Abstract

Deposition of bubbles on a wall withdrawn from a liquid bath is a phenomenon observed in many everyday situations—the foam lacing left behind in an emptied glass of beer, for instance. It is also of importance to the many industrial processes where uniformity of coating is desirable. We report work on an idealized version of this situation, the drag-out of a single bubble in Landau–Levich–Derjaguin flow. We find that a well-defined critical wall speed exists, separating the two regimes of bubble persistence at the meniscus and bubble deposition on the moving wall. Experiments show that this transition occurs at Ca[superscript ∗] ~ Bo[superscript 0.73]. A similar result is obtained theoretically by balancing viscous stresses and gravity.