Effect of Environmental Humidity on Static Foam Stability

The quality of foaming products (such as beer and shampoo) and the performance of industrial processes that harness foam (such as the froth flotation of minerals or the foam fractionation of proteins) depend upon foam stability. In this study, experiments are performed to study the effect of environmental humidity on the collapse of static foams. The dependency of the rate at which a foam collapses upon humidity is demonstrated, and we propose a hypothesis for bubble bursting due to Marangoni instability induced by nonuniform evaporation to help explain the dependency. This hypothesis is supported by direct experimental observations of the bursting process of isolated bubbles by high speed video recording and the thinning of isolated foam films under different values of humidity and temperature by microinterferometric methods.