What You Need

Either

J Large container, at least 2-l size J Air bleed valve to fit the container (or make your own; see instructions) J Water J Flexible tubing

Or

J Aquarium air pump J Flexible tubing J Tubes of different sizes to fit the ends of the flexible tubing J Water

What You Do

Although you can simply tip water out of a wine bottle to hear musical glugging, the effect is only momentary. One way to extend the glugging time is to find a large container and fit it with a small neck. The pitch of the glugging still changes quite rapidly, however. Instrumenting the container with a pressure gauge will give you a clue as to why this happens: the static pressure in the bottle changes. This pressure change does not in itself change the frequency of the glugging

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much, but the fall in static pressure changes the size of the bubbles being produced, as well as the rate at which they are produced. The smaller bubbles yield higher frequencies, which explains why the pitch of the glugging rises as you pour out the liquid. You can better control of the size of the bubbles if you provide separate paths for the water going out and the air coming in. Installing an air pipe will control the bubble size much better than just relying on the air space at the top of the neck of a bottle. However, the pipe should exit underneath the water in the container, otherwise glugging wont happen at all. Choosing a large container also helps because it gives you more time to test out the bubble frequency and see what is going on. With the largish container suggested, you will find that the pitch of the glugging changes only slowly with time. The container should ideally be fitted with a proper air bleed valve and water outlet nozzle. If you look around, you may find a tap or faucet that does exactly what you need. There are no-drip taps for barrels and other containers that have a small plastic assembly with an air inlet, a water outlet, and a lever that cuts off both flow paths. Containers with this kind of faucet are sold for putting in a refrigerator to dispense cool water, for example. But if you cant find one of these, just glue two tubes into the neck of your container, the lower, larger pipe for water, and the upper, smaller pipe for air. The water outlet could be 810 mm in inner diameter, and the inlet 34 mm in inner diameter, for example. The air inlet should end a short way, say, 5 cm, inside the container. Another simple technique is to abandon the container altogether and pump air at a suitable rate into a tube of a suitable diameter. Changing the tube diameter at the same volumetric flow rate, which is what I am suggesting here, changes the pitch of the bubbles. You can use a simple aquarium oscillating-diaphragm pump. These pumps are inexpensive and readily available, but they do have certain disadvantages. They produce a pulsatile air flowpulsating at the domestic electricity frequency of 50 or 60 Hzrather than a smooth flow. A reservoir vessel will smooth out these pulses.

How It Works

Glugging occurs when newly formed bubbles compress and expand rhythmically. This rhythmic vibration is just loud enough to escape the liquid and just the right frequency for us to hear it. Smaller bubbles compress and expand more rapidly

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than larger ones, and the frequency of oscillation is inversely proportional to bubble size. The pump setup simply blows bubbles into the water. In the container setup, the glugging occurs when the pressure in the container falls below the ambient air pressure. The water runs out but air is not getting back in, so the pressure in the air space falls as the air expands. The lower pressure means that ambient air can blow bubbles from the air bleed nozzle inside the neck of the container. Whatever their source, the bubbles will oscillate a little after they are formed, creating the musical sound.

THE

SCIENCE

AND

THE

M AT H

We can estimate the oscillation frequency of a bubble as follows. Suppose a bubble of volume V0 (4/3r3) expands to volume V0 + V, undergoing a corresponding change in its radius, r. The mass, M, of the surrounding liquid that is displaced by the expansion is related to the product of the bubble volume and the density of the liquid. The force, F, required to achieve this expansion is given by F = M(d 2r/dt2) = V0(d 2r/dt2). This force derives from a change in pressure inside the bubble, F = AP, where P is the change in pressure caused by the change in volume, V, and A is the surface area of the bubble. If we assume that the bubble is spherical (A = 4r 2) and that we have approximately isothermal ideal gas conditions, we can use the ideal gas law, PV = nRT, where n is the number of moles of gas, R the gas constant, and T the absolute temperature in Kelvin, to determine the pressure change: (P0 + P)(V0 + V) = nRT, where P0 is the ambient pressure. Solving for small pressure changes, P, from P0 and small volume changes, V, from V0 gives

P0 = nRT/V0 and P0 + P = nRT/(V0 + V). So P = (nRT/V0)(V/V0). Because F = AP, we arrive at V0 (d 2r/dt2) = A(nRT/V0)(Ar)/V0 and d 2r/dt2 = (A/V0)2 (P0 /)r. This equation is rather like the equation for simple harmonic motion for a mass M on a spring of rate K: d 2x/dt2 = (K/M)x, where x is the displacement of the spring. Integration gives x = sin(2ft), which has frequency f = (1/2 ) (K/M). Because A/V0 is just 3/r and because (K/M) = (A/V0)2 (P0 /), our bubble frequency, f, is expected to be approximately f = [3/(2r)] (P0 /). In practice, our assumption of isothermal conditions is likely to be incorrect. At the fast bubble

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oscillations we are talking about, heat does not have time to diffuse from the middle of the bubble to the edges. In other words, the gas expansion is adiabatic, so that the ideal gas equation does not apply. The ratio of the specific heats at constant pressure and constant volume for the gas might enter the equation to compensate for this, as often happens when adiabatic processes occur in gases. In addition, our simplistic assumption of the mass of liquid that is moved by the bubble expansion is not quite right. In fact, Marcel Minnaert first estimated the oscillation frequency of a bubble to be f=

PiVi = Pf Vf , where Pf and Vf are the pressure and volume after some liquid has been poured out. This means that if Vf > Vi , then Pf < Pi . If, for example, we started with a 100-ml volume at the top of the bottle and poured out 10 ml of liquid (thus increasing the ullage volume to 110 ml), then the pressure should drop from 1,000 mbara (atmospheric pressure) to 909 mbara, a drop of 91 mbar. I measured the pressure in the ullage space in a 2-l container as it glugged. Depending upon the angle of pouring and how much water was left, the pressure varied from about 3 mbar to 15 mbar. The pressure in the water is higher at the level of the air bleed nozzle; the pressure, P, varies with water depth, H, according to the following equation: P = gH, where is the waters density. For the kind of water depths we are talking about in our experimental arrangements, we can take a value of about 10 cm. Now 1 cm of water exerts about 1 mbar of pressure. So we might expect to need pressure on the order of a few millibars to push bubbles of air back into the bottle. Our negative Boyles law pressure needs to exceed the hydrostatic pressure in order for glugging to take placea minimum of a few millibars with the container nearly horizontal or 15 mbar or so with the container nearly vertical. Once glugging starts, the air coming in reduces the negative pressure until an equilibrium is reached with air coming in at roughly the same rate as water is leaving through the main spout, with a fairly steady pressure in the ullage space, and with the pressure in the bottle never exceeding 1020 mbar.

[ ] 3/(2r) (P0 /).

For monatomic gases such as argon ( = 5/3), our simple formula is in fact remarkably accurate: Minnaerts equation gives (= 2.9/2) for the con 3/2 stant multiplier, as opposed to our value of 3/2 for the equivalent numerical factor in our formula. However, air contains only 1 percent argon, being mainly nitrogen and oxygen, and has a value of 7/5, which makes our result less spectacularly accurate. And now for some example numbers: for a 5-mm air bubble near the surface of water (at atmospheric pressure), the frequency should be 770 Hz, a musical tone roughly equivalent to the A# above middle C. Our analysis so far deals with the sound emitted by oscillating bubbles, but it does not deal specifically with the glugging sound that occurs when liquid is poured from a container. As you pour liquid from a container, the pressure in the air space above the liquid (the ullage space) falls below the ambient air pressure because air is not getting back in. If we start with an initial volume Vi at an initial pressure Pi , Boyles law tells us that

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