Journal
JOURNAL OF FLUID MECHANICS
Volume 673, Issue -, Pages 147-179Publisher
CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1017/S0022112010006257
Keywords
capillary flows; complex fluids; foams
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Funding
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) [ANR-05-BLAN-0222-01]
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The present study aims at documenting, making use of an original set-up allowing to acquire well-converged data, the coarsening of foams in two dimensions. Experiments show that a foam behaves quite differently depending on the way it has been prepared. We distinguish between an initially quasi-monodisperse foam and a polydisperse foam. The coarsening laws are initially different, although both foams reach a common, time-dependent asymptotic regime. The ageing process relies on exchanges between adjacent foam cells (von Neumann's law), and on topological rearrangement (T-1 and T-2 processes) whose rates are measured in all regimes. We attempt to make their contribution to the evolution of the area S and facet number n distribution of probability P(S, n, t) quantitative. The corresponding mean field theory predictions represent well the phenomenon qualitatively, and are sometimes in quantitative agreement with the measurements. A simplified version of this theory, taking the form of a Langevin model, explains in a straightforward manner the different scaling laws in the different regimes, for the different foams.
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