Foam Bubbles Growth

By sliding the sliders you get an idea of how the size of bubbles and pressure inside them are changing when the bubbles grow. Youcan also turn round the bubbles using your mouse.

Credits

A big Thank You to prof. Steven Abbott for designing and developing the app.

Foam Bubbles

Bubble Volume %
Starting radius μm
Rnow μm
Pnow Bar
Rjoin μm
Pjoin Bar

Ideally each foam bubble would start off at a separate location and grow into an expanding bubble which, when they meet (and not shown here) would merge into a proper polyhedral foam. Up to ~70 volume % bubbles are isolated as a "Kugelschaum" with no real problem of coalescence etc.

As the bubbles get bigger (Rnow) their internal pressure (Pnow = 2γ/R) becomes smaller. If two join then the new bubble has twice the volume but the radius, Rjoin is only 20.333 larger, so the reduction in pressure to Pjoin is not very large - but large enough to drive the process.