Stokes experiment in a liquid foam

The paper reports on the quasistatic steady flow of a dry liquid foam around a fixed spherical bead, a few times larger than the typical bubble size. The force exerted on the bead is recorded with a precision and a time resolution large enough to show the succession of elastic loading of the foam, separated by sudden force drops. The foam structure is observed by direct light transmission, synchronized with the force measurement, thus allowing us to correlate the plastic events with the force variations. Scaling laws for the force signal as a function of the bubble size are detailed and interpreted with a simple elasto-plastic model. The spatial distribution of the plasticity is strongly localized in the first bubble layers around the bead and the average size of the bubble rearrangements increases with the corresponding force jump amplitude. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.