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Lecture_18b

Curved surfaces and young Laplace equation

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2 views

Lecture_18b

Curved surfaces and young Laplace equation

Uploaded by

স্বর্ণেন্দু বাদুড়ী
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Young-Laplace law – curved surfaces

A curved surface in tension will reduce its energy if it shrinks,


So there’s a force pulling a curved surface inwards – a force/unit
area – Pressure!
A bubble shrinks until the pressure inside is high enough to
balance this force.
The Young-Laplace law quantifies this:
Pierre-Simon Laplace
2 1749-1827
Pin Pout = P=
R
pressure difference ΔP for a
Draw bubble
Interface radius of curvature R picture
This can be derived knowing only that “surfaces have energy”.
Hot science – nanobubbles!
There is increasing evidence that tiny ‘nanobubbles’ exist and that they might
play an important but mysterious role in biological systems. What pressure
would you expect inside an oxygen bubble of diameter 5 nm in water? Is this
pressure higher or lower than atmospheric pressure?

Answer:
Simple young Laplace Delta P = 2 gamma / R

These bubbles are little packets of stored energy – the pressure


should be enough to dissolve them, but if they can persist then
their stored energy can influence system behaviour

cf. magic water


Liquids on surfaces

hydrophobic

The fluid-fluid interface angles to the side of the fluid with lower
energy interface.
This the wetting fluid; contact angle < 90

hydrophilic
Chris Hadfield wringing out on ISS: www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8TssbmY-GM
Capillary rise
Due to the force at the contact line, a wetting fluid like
water is pulled up into a tube; this is capillary action.
A non-wetting fluid recedes down the tube.
If the tube is very thin, this effect is magnified since the
mass of the lifted fluid is small.
Trees draw water from their roots to their leaves using a
network of tiny capillaries.

Also the thorny devil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUsARF-CBcI (from 3:45)


Capillary rise example – in tree trunks?
To get the water hundreds of metres up trees, the water is in tiny
tubes in cells in plant leaves.
(a) What’s the pressure of the water in the leaves in a 100m high
tree, assuming a continuous column of water from the ground.
(b) What pore size would this correspond to?

Pressure balance

Delta P = 2 gamma / R
Delta P = m g h
Draw really clear picture
of it
This is crazy – it’s less than a vacuum? This didn’t make sense to
me, it means that the water is under ’tension’, with only the strong
cohesive forces holding it together.

Many open questions on how trees actually do this

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