“We didn’t see it in the freezer, either, at first,” Boreyko said. Moving to a walk-in freezer, the team tried the experiment again, believing they would discover how the floating ice crystals were formed. But, Farzad made a nice model that can accurately predict where the freeze front will stop based on the size of the bubble and the air temperature.”īecause the shell of a bubble is microscopically thin, the warm air temperature in the lab prevented the cold stage from completely freezing the bubble. We didn’t get that lovely ‘snow globe effect’ that we saw on the video. “What we found was that the bubble would freeze from the bottom to a certain point and then stop. “We started by freezing a bubble in the lab, using a frozen substrate,” Boreyko explained. The results of the team’s query, which began as a simple 'why,' has been published in the journal Nature Communications, explaining the physics behind what causes the ice crystals jump up into the bubble and swirl around, thus changing perceptions about the process of freezing. The mesmerizing sight of ice crystals floating around the bubble made the engineers wonder what caused the phenomenon.īoreyko and student researchers Farzad Ahmadi and Saurabh Nath, both graduate students in engineering mechanics, and Christian Kingett, an undergraduate researcher in engineering science and mechanics who graduated in 2019, conducted literature research and found that no one had ever studied how soap films or bubbles freeze. Lead Virginia Tech researcher Jonathan Boreyko, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, and his student researchers were watching a YouTube video of a soap bubble freezing. Without expecting to do more than answer a question posed by a YouTube video, Virginia Tech researchers may have changed how people think about the process of freezing. Scientific inquiry often begins with the 'why.'

Frozen bubble experiment