Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes

September 21st 2020.

From ‘exotic’ to ‘smart’ foams.

The seminar will take place exceptionally in the amphitheatre Pierre Gilles de Gennes. Level -1

The number of people is limited. Please send an email to Michael Berhanu to attend. There will be also a live diffusion with zoom. Contact Michael Berhanu to attend the video seminar.

Arnaud Saint-Jalmes
Directeur de recherche CNRS Institut de Physique de Rennes, UMR 6251, Université de Rennes, France.

In our everyday life, it is very easy and rather common to produce a foam by just mixing air into an aqueous soapy solution. However, beyond classical soaps and surfactants in water, more exotic foams can be obtained by using various types of stabilizers (like proteins, particles, droplets, nano-objects, supramolecular assemblies,…), by foaming oily solutions, or even by using food-related fluids (like coffee and aquafaba). I will first present significant examples and ongoing works illustrating the links between the chemical formulations and the macroscopic sample properties. In parallel, changing in situ the chemical formulation of a foam, by an external stimulus, to obtain an efficient macroscopic reactivity was another challenge. I will present some experiments on gas-liquid interfaces, bubbles and foams doped with stimuli-responsive molecules : these experiments allow us to investigate if a (supra)molecular responsivity can actually be active and transposed up to the macroscopic scale of a soft hierarchical material. Thanks to collaboration with chemists, we performed experiments with thermo-responsive, magneto-responsive and light-responsive chemical formulations, in order to design smart foams.

Related publications :

“Responsive Aqueous Foams” A.L. Fameau, A.Carl, A.Saint-Jalmes and R. von Klitzing. ChemPhysChem 16, 66 (2015).

"Smart Non-Aqueous Foams from Lipid-Based Oleogel" A.L. Fameau, S. Lam, A. Arnould, C. Gaillard, O.D., A. Saint Jalmes. Langmuir 31, 13501 (2015).

"Non-aqueous foams : Current understanding on the formation and stability mechanisms" A.-L. Fameau, A. Saint-Jalmes. Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, 247, pp.454 (2017).

“Controlling foam stability with the ratio of myristic acid to choline hydroxide” A. Arnould ; F. Cousin ; A. Salonen ; A. Saint Jalmes ; A. Perez ; A.L. Fameau. Langmuir, 34, 37, 11076 (2018)

"Design of Responsive Foams with an Adjustable Temperature Threshold of Destabilization". A.L. Fameau, F. Cousin, R. Derrien and A. Saint-Jalmes. Soft Matter, 14, 2578 (2018).

“Interfacial properties, film dynamics and bulk rheology : a multi-scale approach on dairy protein foams” A.Audebert, A.Saint-Jalmes, C. Le Floch-Fouéré, S.Cox , S. Pezennec. J. Coll. Int. Science 542, 222 (2019).