Professor Roberto Zenit, right, with student Madeline Federle. Photography courtesy of Roberto Zenit/Brown University.
Have you ever wondered why the bubbles in your Champagne rise in perfectly straight columns? Neither have I, actually, but Roberto Zenit has, and the implications of that curiosity could have an enormous impact on your life and mine.
While the rest of us see bubbles as a source of joy — the “aah” of a sudsy bath, a laughing toddler chasing soap bubbles, a Champagne toast at a celebration — Zenit, a professor of engineering at Brown University, has spent much of his career studying those tiny gas-filled orbs.
Studying fluid mechanics. Photography courtesy of Roberto Zenit/Brown University.
In spring 2023, it was big news in the world of bubbles (or, more accurately, fluid mechanics) when Zenit and his colleagues at Brown, along with a team of scientists at France’s University of Toulouse, published the results of their study of why Champagne bubbles ascend in a single-file vertical line. In contrast, the researchers found, bubbles in beer and soda follow a more random, chaotic path to the top of a glass.
Zenit allows that such a study might seem frivolous to non-scientists, but bubbles and how they behave are a crucial part of life on Earth. “People are probably not aware of how important bubbles are in everyday life,” he says.
Bubbles keep the ocean healthy, for example. “All that seafoam is bubbles that are oxygenating the water so it can sustain life,” he says.
Bubbles figure into modern medicine, too. Antibiotics grow in what Zenit calls a soup of fungus. “To keep the fungus happy, you inject bubbles to agitate and oxygenate the fluid,” he says. Ultrasound technicians sometimes inject a patient with a contrast agent of microbubbles to make the images clearer, and researchers are studying using microbubbles to deliver cancer-killing drugs directly to tumors.
Zenit, far right, with his students at Brown University. Photography courtesy of Roberto Zenit/Brown University.
Here in Rhode Island, Zenit thinks bubbles may help advance wind farm technology. “Wind farms are great because they’re a non-fossil-fuel source of energy,” he says, “but they produce a lot of vibrations in the water that can disturb marine life.”
Using bubbles to create a sort of curtain or shield around the wind turbines could solve the problem. Scientists in Norway and the Netherlands have been working on the concept, and Zenit is writing a proposal to get funding to study the idea locally.
For Zenit and his colleagues, Champagne is a fun way to study a serious topic. It’s also a way to interest the non-scientists among us, he says.
“By taking a playful approach we hope we can make people realize fluid mechanics is an important part of their daily lives.”