Experimental growth law for bubbles in a wet 3D liquid foam.pdf

a r X i v : c o n d - m a t / 0 7 0 2 6 8 5 v 1 [ c o n d - m a t .s o f t ] 2 8 F e b 2 0 0 7 Experimental growth law for bubbles in a ”wet” 3D liquid foam Je?ro?me Lambert, Isabelle Cantat, and Renaud Delannay G.M.C.M. Universite? Rennes 1 - UMR CNRS 6626 Ba?timent 11A - Campus Beaulieu 35042 Rennes cedex France Rajmund Mokso and Peter Cloetens Imaging Group - ESRF, BP 220, 38043 Grenoble Cedex 9, France James A. Glazier Department of Physics, Swain Hall West 159, Indiana University, 727 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-7105, U.S.A. Franc?ois Graner LSP - UMR 5588 - 140 Avenue de la physique, BP 87 - 38402 Saint Martin d’He?res, France Abstract We used X-ray tomography to characterize the geometry of all bubbles in a liquid foam of average liquid fraction φl ≈ 17% and to follow their evolution, measuring the normalized growth rate G = V ? 1 3 dV dt for 7000 bubbles. While G does not depend only on the number of faces of a bubble, its average over f?faced bubbles scales as Gf ～ f?f0 for large fs at all times. We discuss the dispersion of G and the influence of V on G. PACS numbers: 82.70.Rr, 83.80.Iz 1 Liquid foams consist of bubbles of gas separated by a continuous liquid phase occupying a fraction φl of the foam’s volume. Liquid foams coarsen because gas slowly diffuses through the liquid films from high pressure bubbles to low pressure bubbles so the high pressure bubbles eventually disappear. The dynamics of the coarsening differs in the two limiting cases of dry and infinitely wet foams. In a bubbly liquid, with φl ～ 1, bubbles are spherical and well separated. As in emulsions and diphasic materials, the bubbles coarsen via ”Oswald ripening” as theo- retically described by Lifshitz, Slyozov andWagner (LSW) [1, 2] using a mean-field approach. In the dry foam limit, φl ? 1, bubbles are polyhedral and touch each other. The gas flux between two neighboring bubbles is proportional to their pressure difference, hence to the mean curvature of the film