Chances are, you probably champagne with living the high life. But uncorking a bottle of the bubbly stuff is also provides an illustration of a phenomenon that Japanese researchers say could be used to make electrical-generating plants more efficient. When you open a bottle of champagne, the pressure upon the liquid is abruptly removed, which causes bubbles to form in it. Those bubbles, in turn, quickly begin a process called Ostwald ripening, named after the scientist who discovered it back in 1896. Bigger bubbles, which are more energetic than the smaller ones, attract molecules from them and grow even larger. It’s a phenomenon that’s not only seen in champagne, but in foams and metallic alloys as well, and even in ice cream. NEWS: Giant Bubbles Found in Space And most important, Ostwald ripening happens on a much larger scale in power plants, when bubbles form in heated water that’s being converted to steam to drive the blades of electrical turbines — a factor that can reduce the efficiency of the process. But up to this point, scientists haven’t been able to figure exactly how that works inside the superheated environment of a power plant, and they’ve been unable to accurately calculate the rate at which bubbles form there. But now, according to a just-published study in the Journal of Chemical Physics, researchers from the University of Tokyo, Kyusyu University and RIKEN, a private research institution in Tokyo, have made a breakthrough in understanding Ostwald ripening. By using RIKEN’s computer network, the most powerful one in Japan, they’ve managed to simulate the formation of bubbles. VIDEO: Is It Possible to Power Jets with Water? “A huge number of molecules, however, are necessary to simulate bubbles — on the order of 10,000 are required to express a bubble,” researcher Hiroshi Watanabe explained 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.” The team eventually simulated an astonishing 700 million particles, following their collective motions through a million time steps — a feat they accomplished by performing massively parallel simulations using 4,000 processors. Eventually, the research may yield knowledge that enables engineers to design more efficient turbines. http://news.discovery.com/earth/bubbles-could-provide-energy-breakthrough-141219.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1