EFFECTS OF AIR FLOW ON THE FABRICATION OF CONFINED SMECTIC LIQUID CRYSTAL FOAM

Foams are a substance that have an amazing range of characteristics and potential. These materials are both essential and found throughout our daily lives. They can be found everywhere: in various creams, meringue cookies, soda, shaving foam, and Styrofoam. The structure of foams is a continuously heated topic amongst physicists and mathematicians. This is not only because these systems present an essential role in fundamental research, but also because they expanded greatly in the development of many industrial applications, such as thermal insulation, packing, flotation, and oil recovery. Although most of the studies conducted on foams focus on bubbles that are made of simple fluids, little is known about how foams are arranged and packed when they are made of ordered materials such as liquid crystals. In this work, we use 3D printed devices to fabricate and confine smectic liquid crystal foams and investigate the effects of geometric confinement and airflow rate on their fabrication process and stability. We focus on the interplay between elasticity, surface tension, and the geometry of confinement and investigate how their balance may affect foam structure, assembly, and stability.