Foam clogging

Florence Rouyer (1, 2) , Benjamin Haffner (3, 2) , Nicolas Louvet (4) , Yacine Khidas (3, 2) , Olivier Pitois (3, 2)

1 LPMDI - Laboratoire de Physique des Matériaux Divisés et des Interfaces
2 NAVIER UMR 8205 - Laboratoire Navier
3 Rhéophysique
4 LEMTA - Laboratoire Énergies et Mécanique Théorique et Appliquée

To what extent are aqueous foams prone to clogging? Foam permeability is measured as a function of particulate loading (trapped hydrophilic particles) under conditions where the particle to bubble size ratio is allowed to increase when the number of particles per bubble is fixed. In addition to experiments performed on the foam scale, we investigated experimentally and numerically the hydrodynamic resistance of a single foam node loaded with one particle. It is shown that, with respect to solid porous media, aqueous foams clog more efficiently due to two reasons: (i) the deformation of interfaces allows for larger particles to be incorporated within the interstitial network and (ii) the interfacial mobility contributes to lowering of the reduced permeability.

Keywords: foam; clogging; permeability; hydrodynamic resistance

Domains: Fluid Dynamics [physics.flu-dyn]; Soft Condensed Matter [cond-mat.soft]

Florence Rouyer, Benjamin Haffner, Nicolas Louvet, Yacine Khidas, Olivier Pitois. Foam clogging. Soft Matter, 2014, 10 (36), pp.6990 - 6998. ⟨10.1039/c4sm00496e⟩. ⟨hal-01071753⟩