EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES OF BUBBLE DYNAMICS IN A SLOWLY DRIVEN MONOLAYER FOAM

We report a study of the topological rearrangements in a Langmuir-mono layer foam subjected to a constant rate of strain. Measurements of the size distribution for the rearrangements are compared with three simu lations that find a power-law distribution for a gas area fraction phi = 1, a power law for phi = 0.84, and an exponential cutoff in the siz e distribution. No evidence for power-law scaling is found in the expe riments for 0.85 less than or equal to phi less than or equal to 0.95. These comparisons suggest that the nature of the dissipative mechanis ms is an important factor in the determination of the size distributio n.