Experimental investigation on foam formation through deformable porous media

Abstract

Foam formation in porous media is a topic of growing scientific and industrial interest due to its range of applications, from daily life consumer products to oil recovery. Despite the work done so far on foams flowing through complex structures, such as rigid porous media, this subject still needs to be fully elucidated. An additional complexity to the problem arises when the porous medium is deformable, a situation which has only been faced, to our knowledge, from a modelling point of view. In this work, the investigation of foam formation in deformable porous media is carried out by using commercial sponges as a deformable porous media system, with special emphasis on the effect of confinement on foam bubble size distribution. Foam is formed by wetting the sponge with an aqueous surfactant solution and then squeezing the sponge either between two glass cover slides or between a plastic net and a cover slide. Our experimental data reveal that the latter system allows the formation of drier foams (ie, with lower liquid fraction, fL < 0.3), more similar to the ones obtained in dish‐washing applications. Moreover, the effect of sponge type, in terms of material and microstructure, on final foam is presented. Our results are of potential interest for the optimization of foams in complex structures, such as in deformable porous media.

Formation of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate Foams by Compression of Soft Porous Material

“…The latter investigation (Schrefler and Scotta, 2001) has led to these investigations using a simpler solution so that the behavior of surfactant alone can be understood. Graziano et al (2020) used deformable substrates to form foam; they showed that bubble size decreases as a function of number of squeezes until a plateau value is reached. A similar behavior for the mass of foam produced was found earlier by Johnson et al (2020a), where it was found that after five compression/decompression cycles no further foam would be produced (Johnson et al, 2020a).…”

GRICU 2019 special issue section preface

“…As a matter of fact, the paper fields encompass advanced modelling, [1,2] green fuel production (CO 2 hydrogenation [3] and methanation, [4] CH 4 reforming [5] ), advanced drug production, [6] biochemical food production (microalgae [7] and yeast [8] based), biomedical engineering, [9] process plant management, [10] effluent remediation (for waste water [11] and waste gas [12] streams), polymeric materials, [13] and chemical engineering fundamentals. [14] As it can be seen, all the papers are deeply rooted in chemical engineering science and technology. The wide range of fields and topics covered, as well as the variety of human needs addressed, are what basically makes chemical engineering, the evergreen discipline to which we have all committed our lives, so challenging and thus so exciting.…”