Scientists from the University of Syracuse have created an unusual technology that allows water to "freeze" while it boils, which will allow in the future to understand how to make water boil in space and how to improve the operation of liquid cooling systems for electronics.
American scientists have developed a technology that literally allows you to pause the boiling process, preventing bubbles from forming inside the boiling liquid, according to an article published in Scientific Reports.
“This technology will enable us to analyze the boiling process of water at the most fundamental level. Understanding it will allow us to create surfaces that allow us to maximize heat transfer, as well as understand how we can make water boil in zero gravity, where the absence of gravity leads to the accumulation of bubbles on the heated surface,”said Shalabh Maroo of the University of the city. Syracuse (USA).
Maru and his colleagues learned how to stop boiling thanks to two things - a special laser and a special silicon heating plate, the interaction of which with the laser beam prevented the formation of bubbles in the water.
As scientists say, the process of the appearance of bubbles with steam inside a boiling liquid remains a mystery to physicists: they are not yet completely sure that they know how the phase transition occurs between the liquid and gaseous state of water or other substances, on which the sizes and others depend properties of bubbles.
Steam bubbles, according to Maru, form at the bottom of a heated vessel, where they grow and then rise to the surface. Their properties, the scientist notes, depend on how the thin water layer separating the bottom of the vessel from the bottom of the bubble is arranged. The study of this layer has been virtually impossible to date due to the rate of bubble formation and the lack of proper instruments to observe them.
A group of physicists led by Maru managed to "freeze" the vapor formation process by irradiating a plate of three layers - pure silicon oxide, gold and silicon glass, located at the bottom of a vessel with hot, but not boiling water, using ultra-short laser pulses.
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With constant "laser bombardment", a bubble of steam appears on the surface of this plate, which will remain "glued" to it for hours while scientists continue to irradiate the silicon "sandwich".
Observing this "frozen" vapor bubble has already helped physicists uncover several interesting and previously unknown features of how water boils. For example, scientists have found that the structure of the layer between the bubble and the bottom of the vessel depends on the degree of heating - the higher the temperature, the thinner this layer will be.
Moreover, when a certain mark is reached, it is divided into three different regions - a dry spot appears in its central part, and at the edges there are two zones of water evaporation, in which the liquid turns into vapor according to two different scenarios. Their study, scientists hope, will help create new ultra-efficient cooling systems, and will also allow the crew of the ISS and other space stations and ships to drink hot tea or coffee, boiling water in space.