Browsing by Author "Lankinen, Juhana"

Due to the unique properties of foams, they can be found in many different applications in a wide variety of fields. The study of foams is also useful for the many properties they share with other phenomena, like impurities in cooling metals, where the impurities coarsen similarly to bubbles in foams. For these and other reasons foams have been studied extensively for over a hundred years and continue being an interesting area of study today due to new insights in both experimental and theoretical work and new applications waiting to be used and realized in different industries. The most impactful early work in the study of the properties of foams was done in the late 1800s by Plateau. His work was extended in the early to mid-1900s by Lifshitz, Slyozov, Wagner and von Neumann and by many more authors in recent years. The early work was mostly experimental or theoretical in the sense of performing mathematical calculations on paper, while the modern methods of study have kept the experimental part -- with more refined methods of measurement of course -- but shifted towards the implementation of the theory as simulations instead of solving problems on paper. In the early 90s Durian proposed a new method for simulating the mechanics of wet foams, based on repulsive spring-like forces between neighboring bubbles. This model was later extended to allow for the coarsening of the foam, and a slightly changed version of this model has been implemented in the code presented in this thesis. As foams consist of a very large number of bubbles, it is important to be able to simulate sufficiently large systems to realistically study the physics of foams. Very large systems have traditionally been too slow to simulate on the individual bubble level in the past, but thanks to the popularity of computer games and the continuous demand for better graphics in games, the graphics processing units have become very powerful and can nowadays be used to do highly parallel general computing. In this thesis, a modified version of Durian's wet foam model that runs on the GPU is presented. The code has been implemented in modern C++ using Nvidia's CUDA on the GPU. Using this program first a typical two-dimensional foam is simulated with 100000 bubbles. It is found that the simulation code replicates the expected behaviour for this kind of foam. After this, a more detailed analysis is done of a novel phenomenon of the separation of liquid and gas phases in low gas fraction foams that arises only with sufficiently large system sizes. It is found that the phase separation causes the foam to evolve as would a foam of higher gas fraction until the phases have mixed back together. It is hypothesized that the reason causing the phase separation is related to uneven energy distribution in the foam, which itself is related to jamming and uneven distribution of the sizes of the bubbles in the foam.