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Abstract From air-sea gas exchange, oil pollution, to bioreactors, the ubiquitous fragmentation of bubbles/drops in turbulence has been modeled by relying on the classical Kolmogorov-Hinze paradigm since the 1950s. This framework hypothesizes that bubbles/drops are broken solely by eddies of the same size, even though turbulence is well known for its wide spectrum of scales. Here, by designing an experiment that can physically and cleanly disentangle eddies of various sizes, we report the experimental evidence to challenge this hypothesis and show that bubbles are preferentially broken by the sub-bubble-scale eddies. Our work also highlights that fragmentation cannot be quantified solely by the stress criterion or the Weber number; The competition between different time scales is equally important. Instead of being elongated slowly and persistently by flows at their own scales, bubbles are fragmented in turbulence by small eddies via a burst of intense local deformation within a short time. 

We experimentally investigate the rise velocity of finite-sized bubbles in turbulence with a high energy dissipation rate of $$\unicode[STIX]{x1D716}\gtrsim 0.5~\text{m}^{2}~\text{s}^{-3}$$ . In contrast to a 30–40 % reduction in rise velocity previously reported in weak turbulence (the Weber number ( $We$ ) is much smaller than the Eötvös number ( $Eo$ ); $$We\ll 1