Making a beaker jump by vapor bubble actuation

Bubbles are used in a variety of applications ranging from engineering and medicine to life sciences. Recent advances in microfluidics have made it possible to use micro- and nanoscale bubbles, which are expected to have an even wider range of applications. However, most of the previous studies have focused on the use of bubbles to control fluids and objects in fluids. Moreover, the use of bubbles to control not only fluids but also the systems themselves has rarely been investigated. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a tool to drive a system using bubbles. In this experiment, we dropped water into a beaker filled with heated oil and observed the behavior of the beaker using a high-speed camera. As a result, not only was the fluid in the beaker accelerated upward by the vapor explosion of the superheated water, but the beaker itself also jumped. It was also suggested that the beaker’s jumping height depends on the volume and frequency of the bubbles. Since driving the system using volume oscillation of bubbles is contactless and controllable, the results of this study are expected to be applied to a wide range of scales, including micro-sized systems.