Popping Sound
It’s a nightmare for bubble blowers – the moment when, instead of leaving a bubble wand, a wobbling nearly-bubble seems to change its mind and deflate – hurtling back towards a terrified face and a soapy pop. This unfortunate quirk of surface tension is reversed here, inflating droplets of a soapy substance using ultrasound, as a step towards transforming drug delivery. Acoustic vibrations cause the edge of the droplet to buckle and rise (top row). Resonating vibrations grow the bubble, and a split second later it floats away (bottom right). Adapting the technique for industry, ultrasound could be used to create pharmacological foams – increasingly used over creams to deliver topical drugs onto skin when treating conditions like dermatitis and psoriasis.
Written by John Ankers
- Image adapted from work by Duyang Zang and colleagues
- Functional Soft Matter & Materials Group, Key Laboratory of Space Applied Physics and Chemistry of the Ministry of Education, School of Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
- Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
- Published in Nature Communications, September 2018
You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook
Archive link
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий