Dec 22, 2014 10:55 AM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The process of bubbles forming in a bottle of champagne may be the key to developing electrical plants more sustainable and efficient down the road.

According to Discovery News, a team of Japanese scientists said the process, called Ostwald ripening, is not just limited to champagne. It occurs large-scale in power plants to convert water to steam in order to catalyze turbines.

The researchers published a study on how this process can be used to make such plants more efficient in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

"A huge number of molecules, however, are necessary to simulate bubbles -- on the order of 10,000 are required to express a bubble," study lead author Hiroshi Watanabe, a research associate at the University of Tokyo's Institute for Solid State Physics, said in a press release. "So we needed at least this many to investigate hundreds of millions of molecules - a feat not possible on a single computer."

Because the evaporation of water into steam needs conditions of extreme heat, researchers have not been able to study the rate at which bubbles form during that process. But the authors of the new study believe they have made a groundbreaking discovery in making such observations.

"In the past, while many researchers wanted to explore bubble nuclei from the molecular level, it was difficult due to a lack of computational power," Watanabe said. "But now, several petascale computers - systems capable of reaching performance in excess of one quadrillion point operations per second - are available around the world, which enable huge simulations."

The study could of course have major implications for future engineers, who could one

day use such a model to develop power plants more efficient on energy.

"Bubbles appear when liquid is heated as 'boiling,' or as 'cavitation' when the pressure of the liquid decreases," Watanabe said. "Simulating boiling is more difficult than cavitation at the molecular level, but it will provide us with new knowledge that can be directly applied to designing more efficient dynamo.

"Surfactants make bubbles stable, while defoamers make them unstable.

"Recent developments in computational power will allow us to simulate these kinds of complex systems at the molecular level."

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