CFM 2019

From Bubble Bursting to Sea Spray Evaporation
Alexis Berny  1@  , Luc Deike  2@  , Thomas Séon  1@  , Stéphane Popinet  1, *@  
1 : Institut Jean Le Rond dÁlembert  (DALEMBERT)
Sorbonne Université, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique : UMR7190
2 : Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering [Princeton]  (MAE)
* : Auteur correspondant

Breaking ocean waves entrained underwater air bubbles that rise up to the air-liquid interface and eventually burst. A single bubble bursting can project up to a dozen of tiny jet droplets in the air. Across the oceans, an estimated 10^18 to 10^20 bubbles burst every second, and form the so-called sea spray, a major player in earth's climate system. 
Here we perform numerical simulations of the bursting of a single bubble with the basilisk vof solver. By tracking every droplets detached from the bubble bursting jet, we show that only two scaling laws enable the description of the velocity and the size of each drop. In particular, the universality of the role of bubble shape, capillary waves, gravity, and liquid properties will be discussed. Finally, by considering the evaporation of these drops after a bubble bursts in water, we provide the amount of liquid transferred to the air as a function of the bubble size. We show that this can be convolved with the existing size distributions of the entrained bubbles, in order to have an estimation of the evaporation following a typical breaking wave event.


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