Paper detail

Pinch-off of underwater air bubbles with up--down asymmetry

Topological singularities occur in a broad range of physical systems, including collapsing stars and pinching fluid interfaces. They are important for being able to concentrate energy into a small region. Underwater air bubbles in particular appear in many practical applications, including new technologies to reduce skin drag on cargo ships. Previous theories show that just before an air bubble pinches off, the neck looks like a cylinder at its very smallest point. Unusually, however, the neck approaches this shape so gradually that the theoretical cylinder solution is not reached in practice; the singularity spends its entire lifetime in a transient phase. Therefore, in order to understand the evolution, we study the transient effects in detail. This paper details the simulation results of bubbles with initial conditions far from the cylindrical solution: squat, up--down asymmetric neck shapes, with imposed vertical flow. We find that the asymmetry is transient: the neck quickly shifts vertically to become up--down symmetric. Importantly, we find that the resulting symmetric singularity is a blend of the initial top and bottom sides, with a weighting factor that is tunable by adjusting the airflow through the neck. This effect should have implications for the later stages of evolution, including the generation of satellite bubbles and the formation of the Worthington jet.