A lower bound for the area of Plateau foams

Abstract

Real foams can be viewed as geometrically well-organized dispersions of more or less spherical bubbles in a liquid. When the foam is so drained that the liquid content significantly decreases, the bubbles become polyhedral-like and the foam can be viewed now as a network of thin liquid films intersecting each other at the Plateau borders according to the celebrated Plateau’s laws.

In this paper we estimate from below the surface area of a spherically bounded piece of a foam. Our main tool is a new version of the divergence theorem which is adapted to the specific geometry of a foam with special attention to its classical Plateau singularities.

As a benchmark application of our results, we obtain lower bounds for the fundamental cell of a Kelvin foam, lower bounds for the so-called cost function, and for the difference of the pressures appearing in minimal periodic foams. Moreover, we provide an algorithm whose input is a set of isolated points in space and whose output is the best lower bound estimate for the area of a foam that contains the given set as its vertex set.