Madrid, Jan 22 (IANS): For all those beer lovers, there is some physics involved behind the beer's rapid transformation from a liquid to a foamy state.

There is more to it. What started as a beer floating study can have applications in the area of naval engineering or in studies related to the prediction of gases in volcanic eruptions.

"We decided to take the beer bottle to the lab to analyse which physical phenomena are behind the appearance of that foam," said Javier Rodríguez, a professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Spain.

This fascinating study explains in detail what happens after a beer bottle receives an impact.

First, expansion and compression waves appear. These advance inside the liquid and cause the gas cavities (bubbles) to burst at the bottom of the bottle.

Afterwards, small balls of foam are formed because the bubbles break into even smaller ones. Finally, given that they weigh less than the liquid surrounding them, these bubbles move to the surface so rapidly that the final result is similar to an explosion.

"In fact, those clouds of foam are very much like the mushroom cloud caused by a nuclear explosion," said Rodríguez.

The foam appears because, in carbonated beverages, there is more carbon dioxide (CO2) than the water (the main component) is able to maintain in the solution.

The findings were shared at the American Physics Society's recent conference on fluid mechanics recently.

"You learn low-cost physics in the laboratory, with systems that are as simple as a bottle of beer. This can later help you to understand and attempt to solve other important problems," Rodríguez added.