Week 2 - Bouncing Bubbles

Can we make a bubble bounce?

This week we have tried to make bouncing bubbles. We made simple bubble solution by mixing water and washing up liquid. We then added a liquid called glycerine to the solution. This helps to increase the surface tension of the bubble (and makes the bubble stronger). We talked about if we added too much glycerine the surface tension would be too high to blow a bubble with. We looked at if we could blow a bubble using just the glycerine but we noticed that it is too thick. We wore gloves to test our bubbles and discovered that it was really important to ensure that we had the right consistency for the bubbles to bounce. We learnt that we needed to wear gloves because when a bubble hits your bare hand it will pop because oil or tiny particles on your hand affect the film, breaking it at once, but the soft, clean fibres of a glove do not. If it falls on your glove you should be able to hold it and bounce it. We learnt that bubbles are incredibly thin films of soap, held together by surface tension so the more we increased the surface tension with the glycerine the more chance we had of our bubbles bouncing.