Influence of evaporation on soap film rupture

Abstract

Although soap films are prone to evaporate due to their large surface to volume ratio, the effect of evaporation on macroscopic film features has often been disregarded in the literature. In this work, we investigate experimentally the influence of environmental humidity on soap film stability. An original experiment allows to measure both the maximum length of a film pulled at constant velocity and its thinning dynamics in a controlled atmosphere for various values of the relative humidity $\RH$. At first order, the environmental humidity seems to have almost no impact on most of the film thinning dynamics. However, we find that the film length at rupture increases continuously with $\RH$. To rationalize our observations, we propose that the film bursting occurs when the thinning due to evaporation becomes comparable to the thinning due to liquid drainage. This rupture criterion turns out to be in reasonable agreement with an estimation of the evaporation rate in our experiment.

References in corpus (5)

• Nanoemulsions obtained via bubble bursting at a compound interface
• "Marginal pinching" in soap films
• Natural convection above circular disks of evaporating liquids
• The break-up of free films pulled out of a pure liquid bath
• Convective evaporation of vertical films

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Stability of Big Surface Bubbles: Impact of Evaporation and Bubbles Size
• How to make a giant bubble
• Measurement of the temperature decrease in evaporating soap films
• Lifetime of vertical giant soap films: role of the relative humidity and film dimensions
• Self-similar and Universal Dynamics in Drainage of Mobile Soap Films
• Drainage and lifetime of thin liquid films: the role of salinity and convective evaporation
• Soap Film Drainage Using a Centrifugal Thin Film Balance
• Stabilising Evaporating Soap Films with Salt