Liquid foam Ripening in the ISS
- Post by: Brice Saint-Michel
- 1 August 2024
- No Comment
Coarsening is a ubiquitous phenomenon in phase separations. It is widely observed in alloys, polymers, emulsions, foams, and even in biological systems. However, coarsening of materials where the two phases have comparable volume fractions is still poorly understood. To fill this gap, we performed coarsening experiments on aqueous foams in microgravity—free from gravity-driven destabilization. We discovered that coarsening naturally produces, besides large jammed bubbles, a significant proportion of small roaming bubbles. This hierarchical size distribution is surprising but could be general and exist in other coarsening systems. Foaming being a generic method to produce solid cellular materials with many applications, making use of these roaming bubbles opens up a new way of designing hierarchical materials.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306551120