Effects of liquid fraction and contact angle on structure and coarsening in two-dimensional foams

Abstract

Aqueous foams coarsen with time due to gas diffusion through the liquid. The mean bubble size grows, and small bubbles vanish. However, coarsening is little understood for foams with an intermediate liquid content, particularly in the presence of surfactant-induced attractive forces between the bubbles, measured by the contact angle. Rigorous bubble growth laws have yet to be developed, and the evolution of bulk foam properties is unclear. We present a quasi-static numerical model for coarsening in two-dimensional wet foams, focusing on growth laws and related bubble properties. The deformation of bubbles is modelled using a finite-element approach, and the gas flow through both films and Plateau borders is approximated. We give results for disordered two-dimensional wet foams with 256 to 1024 bubbles, at liquid fractions from $2\%$ to beyond the zero-contact-angle jamming transition, and with contact angles up to $10^{\circ }$. Simple analytical models are developed to aid interpretation. We find that nonzero contact angle causes a proxy of the initial coarsening rate to plateau at large liquid fractions, and that the individual bubble growth rates are closely related to their effective number of neighbours.

21 pages, 19 figures

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Mean-field model for the bubble size distribution in coarsening wet foams