title: Coarsening foams robustly reach a self-similar growth regime.
abstract: Dry liquid foams coarsen like other diphasic systems governed by interfacial energy: gas slowly diffuses across liquid films, resulting in large bubbles growing at the expense of smaller ones which eventually shrink and disappear. A foam scatters light very effectively, preventing direct optical observation of bubble sizes and shapes in large foams. Using high speed x-ray tomography, we have produced 4D movies (i.e., 3D + time) of up to 30,000 bubbles. After a transient regime, the successive images look alike, except that the average bubble size increases as the square root of time: This scaling state is the long sought self-similar growth regime. The bubble size and face-number distributions in this regime are compared with experimental distributions for grains in crystals and with numerical simulations of foams.
authors.affiliation: IPR Université Rennes 1, UMR CNRS 6251, bâtiment 11a, Campus Beaulieu, 35042 Rennes Cedex, France. jerome.lambert@univ-rennes1.fr
authors.forename: Jérôme
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lambert
authors.forename: Rajmund
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mokso
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Cantat
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Cloetens
authors.forename: James A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Glazier
authors.forename: François
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Graner
authors.forename: Renaud
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Delannay