A new research has just revealed how the spilling can be stopped as you walk along with your mug. Scientists from Princeton University have found that just a few layers of bubbles can significantly dampen the sloshing motion of liquid. "While I was studying for my PhD in the south of France, we were in a pub and we noticed that when we were carrying a pint of Guinness beer which is a very foamy beer, the sloshing almost did not happen at all," said Alban Sauret, currently a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).
The scientists took their observations from the coffeehouse and the pub to the laboratory where they built an apparatus to test the damping power of foam. They constructed a narrow rectangular container made of glass which they filled with a solution of water, glycerol (a common substance that increases the fluid viscosity) and the commercial dishwashing detergent Dawn.
"The dishwashing foam is very stable which allowed us to conduct the experiments without the bubbles disappearing," said Francois Boulogne, another member of the team. The foam dissipated the energy of the sloshing liquid through friction with the sides of the container. "The potential applications are much bigger than just beer," Sauret concluded in a paper that appeared in the journal Physics of Fluids.
By Premji
