Advertisements
Advertisements
Question
The force of surface tension acts tangentially to the surface whereas the force due to air pressure acts perpendicularly on the surface. How is then the force due to excess pressure inside a bubble balanced by the force due to the surface tension?
Advertisements
Solution
The forces act tangentially to the bubble surface on both sides of a given line but they have one component normal to the bubble surface. This component balances the force due to excess pressure inside the bubble.
In the figure, let us consider a small length AB on the surface of the spherical bubble. Let the surface forces act tangentially along A and B. On producing the forces backwards, they meet at a point O. By the parallelogram law of forces, we see that the resultant force acts opposite to the normal. This balances the internal forces due to excess pressure.

APPEARS IN
RELATED QUESTIONS
Explain why Water on a clean glass surface tends to spread out while mercury on the same surface tends to form drops. (Put differently, water wets glass while mercury does not.)
Fill in the blanks using the word(s) from the list appended with each statement
Surface tension of liquids generally . . . with temperatures (increases / decreases)
A U-shaped wire is dipped in a soap solution and removed. The thin soap film formed between the wire and the light slider supports a weight of 1.5 × 10–2 N (which includes the small weight of the slider). The length of the slider is 30 cm. What is the surface tension of the film?
Mercury has an angle of contact equal to 140° with soda lime glass. A narrow tube of radius 1.00 mm made of this glass is dipped in a trough containing mercury. By what amount does the mercury dip down in the tube relative to the liquid surface outside? Surface tension of mercury at the temperature of the experiment is 0.465 N m–1. Density of mercury = 13.6 × 103 kg m–3
The total energy of free surface of a liquid drop is 2π times the surface tension of the liquid. What is the diameter of the drop? (Assume all terms in SI unit).
A body weighs 4.0 kg-wt on the surface of the Earth. What will be its weight on the surface of a plant whose mass is `1/8` th of the mass of the Earth and radius half `(1/2)` of that of the Earth?
When a sparingly soluble substance like alcohol is dissolved in water, surface tension of water
When the size of a soap bubble is increased by pushing more air in it, the surface area increases. Does it mean that the average separation between the surface molecules is increased?
The properties of a surface are different from those of the bulk liquid because the surface molecules
(a) are smaller than other molecules
(b) acquire charge due to collision from air molecules
(c) find different type of molecules in their range of influence
(d) feel a net force in one direction.
When a capillary tube is dipped into a liquid, the liquid neither rises nor falls in the capillary.
(a) The surface tension of the liquid must be zero.
(b) The contact angle must be 90°.
(c) The surface tension may be zero.
(d) The contact angle may be 90°.
The capillaries shown in figure have inner radii 0.5 mm, 1.0 mm and 1.5 mm respectively. The liquid in the beaker is water. Find the heights of water level in the capillaries. The surface tension of water is 7.5 × 10−2 N m−1.

A capillary tube of radius 0.50 mm is dipped vertically in a pot of water. Find the difference between the pressure of the water in the tube 5.0 cm below the surface and the atmospheric pressure. Surface tension of water = 0.075 N m−1.
A cubical block of ice floating in water has to support a metal piece weighing 0.5 kg. Water can be the minimum edge of the block so that it does not sink in water? Specific gravity of ice = 0.9.
How much amount of work is done in forming a soap bubble of radius r?
Define the angle of contact for a given pair of solid and liquid.
A molecule of water on the surface experiences a net ______.
The sufrace tension and vapour pressure of water at 20°C is 7.28 × 10–2 Nm–1 and 2.33 × 103 Pa, respectively. What is the radius of the smallest spherical water droplet which can form without evaporating at 20°C?
A soap bubble of radius 3 cm is formed inside another soap bubble of radius 6 cm. The radius of an equivalent soap bubble which has the same excess pressure as inside the smaller bubble with respect to the atmospheric pressure is ______ cm.
Two blocks of masses m and M are connected by means of a metal wire of cross-sectional area A passing over a frictionless fixed pully as shown in the figure. The system is then released. If M = 2m, then the stress produced in the wire is ______.

