Statistics and topological changes in 2D foam from the dry to the wet limit

Abstract

The software PLAT, for the simulation of two-dimensional foams, has never been fully exploited, particularly in the wet limit, where it has difficulty converging. Present computer resources have enabled us to circumvent this problem. Using a data-set of 600,000 simulations, we are able to compute the polydisperse foam excess energy all the way from the dry to the wet limit. We also present data and a simple empirical function for the number distribution of n-sided bubbles for all values of the average contact number Z. Furthermore we show that, starting from a dry foam, incremental increases in liquid fraction bring with them a steadily increasing fraction f of bubbles involved in rearrangements. The size distribution of these rearrangements is found to be exponential, , where the mean, , increases in the wet limit.

Keywords:

• Foam excess energy
• 2D foams
• simulation
• wet foams
• bubble side distribution
• bubble rearrangements

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Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This publication has emanated from research supported in part by a research grant from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under [grant number 13/IA/1926]. This article is based upon work from COST Actions MP1106 ‘Smart and green interfaces’ and MP1305 ‘Flowing matter’, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). We also acknowledge the support of the European Space Agency ESA, Project microG-Foam, AO-99-075 and [contract 4000115113], ‘Soft Matter Dynamics’. Additional calculations were performed on the Lonsdale cluster maintained by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. This cluster was funded through grants from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).