Gas-Liquid Foam Dynamics: From Structural Elements to Continuum Descriptions

Gas-liquid foams are important in applications ranging from oil recovery and mineral flotation to food science microfluidics. Beyond their practical use, they represent an intriguing prototype of a soft material with complex, viscoelastic rheological response. Crucially, allow detailed access fluid-dynamical processes on the mesoscale bubbles underlying large-scale behavior. This review emphasizes importance geometry interaction structural elements for description dynamics entire foams. Using examples including bulk flow foam under steady shear, interfacial instabilities, fracture through bubble rupture, this article highlights wide variety available theoretical descriptions, network modeling approaches coupling element equations motion full continuum models elastoviscoplastic constitutive relations. Foams offer opportunity develop rigorous links between such disparate providing blueprint physical dynamical multiscale systems complex structure.