Physicists reveal the mechanics of tea scum

If you have ever brewed a cup of black tea with hard water you will be familiar with the oily film that can form on the surface of the tea after just a few minutes.

Known as “tea scum” the film consists of calcium carbonate crystals within an organic matrix. Yet it can be easily broken apart with a quick stir of a teaspoon.

Physicists in France and the UK have now examined how this film forms and also what happens when it breaks apart through stirring.

They did so by first sprinkling graphite powder into a water tank. Thanks to capillary forces, the particles gradually clump together to form rafts. The researchers then generated waves in the tank that broke apart the rafts and filmed the process with a camera.

Through these experiments and theoretical modelling, they found that the rafts break up when diagonal cracks form at thte raft’s centre. This causes them to fracture into larger chunks before the waves eventually eroded them away.

They found that the polygonal shapes created when the rafts split up is the same as that seen in ice floes.

Despite the visual similarities, however, sea ice and tea scum break up through different physical mechanisms. While ice is brittle, bending and snapping under the weight of crushing waves, the graphite rafts come apart when the viscous stress exerted by the waves overcome the capillary forces that hold the individual particles together.

Buoyed by their findings, the researchers now plan to use their model to explain the behaviour of other thin biofilms, such as pond scum.