A model for soap film dynamics with evolving thickness

Abstract

Previous research on animations of soap bubbles, films, and foams largely focuses on the motion and geometric shape of the bubble surface. These works neglect the evolution of the bubble's thickness, which is normally responsible for visual phenomena like surface vortices, Newton's interference patterns, capillary waves, and deformation-dependent rupturing of films in a foam. In this paper, we model these natural phenomena by introducing the film thickness as a reduced degree of freedom in the Navier-Stokes equations and deriving their equations of motion. We discretize the equations on a non-manifold triangle mesh surface and couple it to an existing bubble solver. In doing so, we also introduce an incompressible fluid solver for 2.5D films and a novel advection algorithm for convecting fields across non-manifold surface junctions. Our simulations enhance state-of-the-art bubble solvers with additional effects caused by convection, rippling, draining, and evaporation of the thin film.

Culinary fluid mechanics and other currents in food science

“…To conclude this section, we note that modern video games use computer-generated imagery (CGI) techniques coupled to mathematical models that vary the soap film thickness to render bubbles realistically [906]. Moreover, the nature of the boundary between water and oil is crucial to many nanometre-scale assembly processes, including biological functions such as protein folding and liquidliquid phase separation [907,908].…”

A momentum-conserving implicit material point method for surface tension with contact angles and spatial gradients

“…The Marangoni effect was resolved by recently with thin soap films to generate compelling dynamics of the characteristic rainbow patterns in bubbles. Relatedly, Ishida et al [2020] simulated the evolution of soap films including effects of thin-film turbulence, draining, capillary waves, and evaporation. Outside of computer graphics, the Marangoni effect has been recently studied in works like [Dukler et al 2020], which models undercompressive shocks in the Marangoni effect, and [de Langavant et al 2017], which presents a spatially-adaptive level set approach for simulating surfactant-driven flows.…”

A Momentum-Conserving Implicit Material Point Method for Surface Energies with Spatial Gradients

“…The Marangoni effect was resolved by recently with thin soap films to generate compelling dynamics of the characteristic rainbow patterns in bubbles. Relatedly, Ishida et al [2020] simulated the evolution of soap films including effects of thin-film turbulence, draining, capillary waves, and evaporation. Outside of computer graphics, the Marangoni effect has been recently studied in works like Dukler et al [2020], which models undercompressive shocks in the Marangoni effect, and de Langavant et al [2017], which presents a spatially-adaptive level set approach for simulating surfactant-driven flows.…”