Marangoni stress induced by rotation frustration in a liquid foam

Abstract

The role of surface tension gradients in the apparent viscosity of liquid foams remains largely unexplained. In this article, we develop a toy-model based on a periodic array of 2D hexagonal bubbles, each bubble being separated from its neighbors by a liquid film of uniform thickness. The two interfaces of this thin liquid film are allowed to slide relatively to each other, thus shearing the liquid phase in between. We solve the dynamics under external shear of this minimal system and we show that the continuity of the surface tension around the whole bubble is the relevant condition to determine the bubble rotation rate and the energy dissipation. This result is expected to be robust in more complex situations and illustrates that thin film dynamics should be solved at the scale of the whole bubble interface when interface rheology matters.