Does gas supersaturation by a chemical reaction produce bulk nanobubbles?

Supersaturation of dissolved gas is the most commonly reported method for generating long-lived bulk nanobubbles. However, these reports are treated with skepticism because of the lack of techniques that directly show that these particles are gas filled bubbles. Therefore, this work has tested the hypothesis that supersaturation obtained by a chemical reaction produces long-lived nanosized bubbles in bulk using an established protocol that relies on evaluating the density of nanoparticles and measuring their response to external pressure.

Nanoparticles were generated using a chemical reaction between aqueous solutions of ammonium chloride and sodium nitrite. Standard nanoparticle sizing techniques, such as nanoparticle tracking analysis and dynamic light scattering, were utilized to determine the size and stability of the nanoparticles. Resonant mass measurement was used to measure the buoyant mass of the nanoparticles, and their compressibility was investigated by measuring their size under the application of external pressure.

The formation of nanoparticles was consistent with the kinetics of nitrogen gas evolution produced in the reaction, where the nanoparticle size was shown to be dependent on the pH and concentration of the reactants. However, the chemical reaction was found to generate incompressible nanoparticles with a density larger than that of the solvent, confirming that these particles were not gas-filled bubbles.