The Physics of Foams

Abstract

A guide to further reading is provided through carefully selected references."--Jacket. A pleasant experiment -- The elements of foam structure -- Metastability -- Essential properties of a foam -- Both a solid and a liquid -- Drainage -- Coarsening -- Collapse -- Length and time scales -- Early history -- Foam as a prototypical system -- Local equilibrium rules -- The law of Laplace -- Laplace's law in two dimensions -- The laws of Plateau -- Laplace's law at a Plateau border junction -- Bubble-bubble interaction -- Quantitative description of foam structures -- Some necessary definitions -- Statistics -- Some further theorems and correlations -- Aboav-Weaire law -- Curvature sum rule in two dimensions -- Curvature sum rule in three dimensions -- Euler's equation -- An application of Euler's equation for two-dimensional wet foams -- Topological changes -- Systematic expansions in the dry foam limit -- Quantitative description of topological changes -- The osmotic pressure -- Vertex stability -- Other instabilities -- Wet vertices -- The surface liquid fraction -- Making foams -- Foam composition -- Different methods of foam production -- Blowing bubbles with a nozzle--some practical advice -- Foam tests -- Foams in microgravity -- Two-dimensional foams -- Imaging and probing foam structure -- Matzke's experiment -- Visual imaging and optical tomography -- The principle of Archimedes -- Segmented measurements of capacitance and resistance -- AC capacitance measurement -- Conductance measurement -- MRI -- Optical glass fibre probe method -- Optical measurement of film thinning -- Light scattering.