Walks of bubbles on a hot wire in a liquid bath

Abstract

When a horizontal resistive wire is heated up to the boiling point in a subcooled liquid bath, some vapor bubbles nucleate on its surface. Traditional nucleate boiling theory predicts that bubbles generated from active nucleate sites, grow up and depart from the heating surface due to buoyancy and inertia. However, we observed here a different behavior: the bubbles slide along the heated wire. In this situation, unexpected regimes are observed; from the simple sliding motion to bubble clustering. We noticed that bubbles could rapidly change their moving direction and may also interact. Finally, we propose an interpretation for both the attraction between the bubbles and the wire and for the motion of the bubbles on the wire in term of Marangoni effects.