Destabilizing surface bubbles with excessive bulk oversaturation

Abstract

The response and dynamics of surface-attached bubbles in gas-oversaturated environments have practical implications for industrial processes such as photocatalytic water splitting. Surprisingly, the behavior of microbubbles and nanobubbles depends rather strongly on the nucleation techniques, e.g., solvent exchange gives rise to stable bubbles, while other methods like electrochemical water splitting produce unstable ones. By experimentally investigating a prototypical system of bubble nucleation, we show how these outcomes are determined by a competition between gas oversaturation and contact line friction. We derive a stability line in the oversaturation-radius parameter space, which not only agrees with our experiments but also correctly predicts the outcome of previous experiments across five orders in oversaturation and bubble radius.