Attraction-induced jamming in the flow of foam through a channel

Abstract

We study the flow of a pressure-driven foam through a straight channel using numerical simulations, and examine the effects of a tuneable attractive potential between bubbles. We show that the effect of an attractive potential is to introduce a regime of jamming and stick–slip flow in a channel, and report on the behaviour resulting from varying the strength of the attraction. We find that there is a force threshold below which the flow jams, and upon further increasing the driving force, a crossover from intermittent (stick–slip) to smooth flow is observed. This threshold force below which the foam jams increases linearly with the strength of the attractive potential. By examining the spectra of energy fluctuations, we show that stick–slip flow is characterized by low frequency rearrangements and strongly local behaviour, whereas steady flow shows a broad spectrum of energy drop events and collective behaviour. Our work suggests that the stick–slip and the jamming regimes occur due to the increased stabilization of contact networks by the attractive potential – as the strength of attraction is increased, bubbles are increasingly trapped within networks, and there is a decrease in the number of contact changes.