# Stability of Big Surface Bubbles: Impact of Evaporation and Bubbles Size

## TL;DR

This study investigates how evaporation and bubble size influence the lifetime and thinning dynamics of large surface bubbles, combining experimental data with models to understand drainage and rupture processes under varying humidity conditions.

## Contribution

It provides new experimental insights and models on bubble drainage and evaporation effects, especially under different humidity levels, for centimetric surface bubbles.

## Key findings

- Drainage is best modeled by capillary and gravity effects.
- Evaporation predominantly determines bubble lifetime.
- Convective evaporation dominates mass loss far from saturation.

## Abstract

Surface bubbles have attracted much interest in the past decades. In this article, we propose to explore the lifetime and thinning dynamics of centimetric surface bubbles. We study the impact of the bubbles size as well as that of the atmospheric humidity through a careful control and systematic variation of the relative humidity in the measuring chamber. We first adress the question of the drainage under saturated water vapor conditions and show that a model including both capillary and gravity driven drainage provides the best prediction for this process. Additionally, unprecedented statistics on the bubbles lifetimes confirm experimentally that this parameter is set by evaporation to leading order. We make use of a model based on the overall thinning dynamics of the thin film and assume a rupture thickness of the order 10-100 nm to obtain a good representation of these data. For experiments conducted far from saturation, the convective evaporation of the bath is shown to dominate the overall mass loss in the cap film due to evaporation.