September 2016: We are advertising for a PDRA to work on the European Space Agency grant "Hydrodynamics of Wet Foams".
July 2016: We all visited Dublin for EuFoam 2016, at Trinity College Dublin, where Tudur and Adil gave talks.
June 2016: Francesca and Simon visited University College Dublin to attend the mid-term review of the Horizon2020 RISE project Matrixassay, preceded by a one day workshop on Mechanics and Electromechanics of Biomaterials.
May 2016: Aberystwyth were the organizers of this year's Wales Mathematics Colloquium at Gregynog Hall, with over 60 delegates and four excellent invited speakers.
May 2016: At the invitation of the Korean Society of Rheology, Simon attended ISAR 2016 and gave a talk on foam rheology. It was also a great opportunity to experience something of Korean culture, including Noreban, better known as Karaoke.
April 2016: Simon and Francesca attended the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium in the new Andrew Wiles Building of the Mathematical Institute in Oxford.
February 2016: "What is the shape of an air bubble on a liquid surface?" A recent paper with colleagues in Portugal, France and the UK has been highlighted by the University of Lisbon here.
January 2016: An article arising from discussions that took place at the informal "Forces in Tissues" workshop that Simon attended in Paris in May 2014 has now been published in the journal Development. The article reviews techniques for measuring forces and stresses in living biological tissues.
January 2016: The European Space Agency's Soft Matter Dynamics Microgravity project held a foam kick-off workshop in Paris. Simon presented work on coarsening simulations.
December 2015: We are advertising for a PDRA to work on the EPSRC grant Flow of Gas-Liquid Foams in Narrow Complex Geometries.
December 2015: Simon attended the British Society of Rheology's Mid-winter Meeting in Glasgow, and learnt about Microrheology and Microfluidics.
September 2015: Adil and Simon are in Berlin to Shape Up, at a conference on Materials Geometry and Topology. Simon spoke about minimal perimeter tilings of the sphere, and Adil presented work with Gerd Schroeder-Turk on the energetics of bubbles in curved Hele Shaw cells and attempts to enourage bees to build their honeycombs on complex surfaces.
August 2015: Tudur is at the Welsh National Eisteddfod with bubble demonstrations and other mathematical treats.
July 2015: We have been awarded a grant by EPSRC to work on the Flow of Gas-Liquid Foams in Narrow Complex Geometries. This is a joint project with colleagues in Birmingham and Cambridge, with industrial support from BTG, Unilever and Schlumberger.
June 2015: Simon will give an introduction at the prize giving ceremony for the Maths Challenge organised by the University's widening participation team. The questions were on a theme of Alice in Wonderland, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll's book.
May 2015: Simon and Tudur attended the LMS WIMCS Bath Analysis Day, including a special guest lecture from Neil Sloane, founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
March 2015: Simon will give a public lecture on foams at Lincoln University on Monday 2nd March.
January 2015: Last chance to submit abstracts for the next spring meeting of the Institute of non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics at Ruthin Castle, 30th March to 1st April 2015. The theme will be Structured Fluids. See the INNFM website for further details.
December 2014: Simon attended the British Society of Rheology's midwinter meeting on active and complex fluids at Durham.
September 2014: This month's science cafe at Aberystwyth Arts Centre was on Mathematics in the Bath. Simon presented some ideas from the geometry of soap bubbles, followed by a grilling from the audience.
August 2014: Simon was interviewed on Radio Cardiff as part of the Science and Technology Radio Show "Pythagoras' Trousers", talking about foams and bubbles.
July 2014: Michael Dennin from UC Irvine is visiting Aberystwyth to discuss foam rheology.
July 2014: Simon attended the EuFoam conference in Thessaloniki, Greece, speaking about The effects of channel geometry on foam structure and flow, and a conference on Recent Advances in Numerical Simulation of Hydraulic Fracture in Rzeszow, Poland, speaking about The effects of pore geometry on foam flow in porous media.
June 2014: Tudur and Llinos got married!
May 2014: Simon is currently on overseas leave as Professeur Invité at the Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes at the Université Paris Diderot for a month, working with Florence Elias and others.
April 2014: The next spring meeting of the Institute of non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics will be at Ruthin Castle, 30th March to 1st April 2015. The theme will be Structured Fluids. See the INNFM website for further details.
April 2014: From 14th to 16th, Tudur and Simon are at the Institute of non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics Spring Meeting at spectacular Lake Vyrnwy. The theme of this year's conference is Advances in Rheometry, and the proceedings will be dedicated to Ken Walters on the occasion of his 80th birthday and in recognition of his contributions to rheology. The meeting also plays host to the AGM of the British Society of Rheology.
February 2014: The Foams and Minimal Surfaces follow-up meeting will be held during the last week of this month. Almost 50 foamy people, many of them from the original meeting in 2002, will be in Cambridge for the week. The programme is now available on the website of the Newton Institute.
December 2013: Simon learnt about the rheology of Coating, Printing and Painting at the BSR's midwinter meeting in Cambridge.
November 2013: The website for the 2014 British Applied Mathematics Colloquium is now available. The meeting will be held in Cardiff next April, organised by members of WIMCS.
November 2013: Simon will be teaching at the school on the Structure and dynamics of liquid foams and their applications in Orsay, France, during the first week of November. The school is loosely based on the book Foams: Structure and Dynamics.
July 2013: The translated French textbook on foams: "Foams: Structure and Dynamics" is now available from OUP. It contains chapters on Uses of foams; Foams at equilibrium; Birth, life and death; Rheology; Experimental and numerical methods, all interwoven to provide an exhaustive source on the physics and physico-chemistry of foams.
June 2013: Joint work with colleagues in Rennes has resulted in a featured paper in Physics of Fluids, on the flow of foams down parallel narrow channels.
May 2013: Simon attended a joint workshop in Swansea between WIMCS and STFC's Hartree Centre on Challenges and Opportunities in Computational Modelling, and learned alot about different simulation tools in various fields.
April 2013: Simon has been elected as a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
April 2013: An image from a joint publication, "Comparative study of non-invasive force and stress inference methods in tissue", led by groups in Japan and France, that uses Simon's Surface Evolver data, will appear on the next cover of the European Physical Journal E. You can see it here.
April 2013: The group attended the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium (BAMC) in Leeds. David, Tudur and Simon gave talks and Oliver took a poster on simulating visco-elasto-plastic fluids as a proxy for foams.
March 2013: Simon gave a talk on joint work with Andy Kraynik at the INNFM's Kavli meeting, and presented posters by Tudur and David.
February 2013: Oliver Bain has joined us as a PDRA, funded by RIVIC. Oliver completed his PhD in Applied Mathematics at Nottingham University. He will work on continuum modelling of foam flows.
January 2013: Simon gave a talk on foam rheology as part of the inaugural event of the Infoamal workshop on Foam Coarsening in Paris.
December 2012: We are currently advertising for a PDRA to work on modelling and visualization of foams.
November 2012: Simon visited Rzeszow University of Technology in Poland to discuss work on hydraulic fracturing and give a seminar in the Faculty of Engineering on The structure, dynamics and applications of foams. He then started an industrial secondment at Eurotech, who make oilfield equipment.
November 2012: We will organise the mid-winter meeting of the British Society of Rheology in Aberystwyth next month. The theme is Extensional Flows.
November 2012: Rob Kusner visited from the Isaac Newton Institute (and, indirectly, the University of Massachusetts Amherst). He gave seminars on "The space of soap bubbles" and "Torus tilings and smectic singularities"; the latter was in response to a problem we had discussed just over 10 years ago, again at the INI. He also climbed Cadair Idris!
October 2012: Gerd Schroeder-Turk visited from Erlangen to work (mainly) with Adil, on a trip funded by WIMCS. He gave a seminar on "Platonic Foam Cells" in IMAPS and another on "The chiral photonic crystal in the butterfly Callophrys Rubi" in IBERS.
September 2012: Simon and Edwin went to Dublin to participate in the workshop on Packing Problems co-organised by Adil. All three of us gave talks on various aspects of packing bubbles and spheres.
September 2012: Tudur started a Welsh Medium lectureship in IMAPS, with support from the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol.
August 2012: Tudur presented soap bubble experiments with wire frames and shortest networks at the National Eisteddfod of Wales in the Vale of Glamorgan.
July 2012: David Ferguson won a poster prize for his work on Foams in Porous Media at the 9th EuFoam conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Adil, Tudur and Simon all gave short presentations.
June 2012: Kirsten Williams, Aberystwyth MMath student, has started a Walter Idris Jones summer research scholarship. She will work on the optimal geometry of clusters of cells.
June 2012: Frank Morgan wrote about our recent preprint on the geometry of soap bubble clusters on his Huffington post blog.
June 2012: Simon gave a seminar at the Institut Navier in Paris, on "Modelling the structure and rheology of foams". He also discussed rheology and drainage of foams with colleagues there and at other Parisian universities.
May 2012: Simon co-organised the Wales Mathematics Colloquium 2012 at Gregynog Hall.
May 2012: Adil will organise, with Stefan Hutzler, a workshop on packing problems in Dublin in September.
April 2012: Simon and Tudur attended a RIVIC event in Cardiff. Tudur presented his work on the Stokes problem in foams as part of the graduate school in visual computing.
March 2012: Simon attended and co-organised, with Frank Morgan and John Sullivan, a succesful workshop at the ICMS in Edinburgh on Isoperimetric problems, space-filling, and soap bubble geometry.
Feb/March 2012: Paul Grassia (Manchester) came for an extended visit to Aberystwyth to work on problems in oil recovery, funded by the Hydrofrac FP7 grant. Bill Rossen (Delft) joined us briefly, and gave an institute seminar on "Foam Generation for Improved Sweep Efficiency in Enhanced Oil Recovery".
January 2012: Simon attended and co-organised a succesful CECAM workshop at TCD on the Dissipative Rheology of Foams. He is slowly compiling contributions from speakers.
December 2011: Tudur spoke at the Midwinter meeting of the British Society of Rheology, held at UCL. Ex-group member Sian Jones was also there, talking about her French foam experiments.
November 2011: We hosted a visit from Andy Kraynik, formerly of Sandia and Manchester University, under the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Scheme of the Royal Academy of Engineering. This was a joint application with Stephen Neethling at Imperial College London, where Andy also spent a fortnight. We worked together on developing robust algorithms for exploring the structure and rheology of wet foams.
November 2011: Benjamin Dollet and Sian Jones visited from the Institute de Physique de Rennes under our jointly-funded Alliance British Council grant. We made progress in comparing simulations, experiments and theory of flowing foams.
October 2011: Foams as art ... here are the bubble pictures from
the foyer of the Physical Sciences Building, taken in our experimental laboratory:
Please acknowledge foams@aber if you use them.
October 2011: A preliminary programme is now available for our CECAM workshop on the Dissipative Rheology of Foams in Dublin next January.
October 2011: Together with Frank Morgan and John Sullivan, Simon will organise a workshop at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences on Isoperimetric problems, space-filling, and soap bubble geometry, to be held in March 2012.
August 2011: Bob Laramee and Dan Lipsa, from Swansea University's department of Computer Science visited. We discussed the visualisation of data from our foam simulations, in work funded by RIVIC.
June 2011: Andrew Kraynik visited from the University of Manchester to work with Simon on simulating the dynamics of wet foams.
June 2011: Simon and Tudur visited the Institute de Physique de Rennes to work with colleagues there under our jointly-funded Alliance British Council grant. Tudur presented his work on spheres in foams at the foams group meeting.
May 2011: The University of Texas at Austin hosted an IUTAM Symposium on the Mechanics of Liquid and Solid Foams. Simon was a member of the scientific committee, and presented our work on Elasto-Plastic Flows of Foams.
May 2011: Sian's PDRA position has now come to an end, and she has moved to Rennes to work on foam flow in porous media at the Institute de Physique de Rennes.
April 2011: Simon spoke at the University of Wales Institute of Non-Newtonian Mechanics spring rheology meeting at Portmeirion in North Wales.
April 2011: Simon attended a workshop organised jointly by the Isaac Newton Institute and WIMCS at Swansea University on Computational Challenges in PDEs. He spoke about bubble-scale models of foam rheology.
January/February 2011: Simon visited Profs. Fatima Vaz and Paulo Teixeira in Lisbon, Portugal, and hosted their reciprocal visits to Aberystwyth, funded under the Treaty of Windsor exchange programme. We are working together to analyse the results of experiments and simulations on the uniaxial, cyclic extension of two-dimensional foams.
January 2011: CECAM will fund a workshop on the Dissipative Rheology of Foams, organised by Simon, Stefan Hutzler (Dublin), Isabelle Cantat (Rennes) and Reinhard Hohler (Paris). It will be held in Dublin next year, January 9-12, 2012.
January 2011: Simon and Adil hosted visitors from Trinity College Dublin: Prof. Denis Weaire came to discuss sphere packings, while Mike Sexton captured experimental and simulated data on the statistics of foam structure and flow.
December 2010: Simon gave a lecture to both the Lancashire and North-west Branch of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the Lancashire and Cumbria Branch of the Institute of Physics, hosted by the University of Central Lancashire. Some of the slides are available .
November/December 2010: We hosted the return visits of Dr Benjamin Dollet and Dr Jerome Lambert from the Institute de Physique de Rennes, under our jointly-funded Alliance British Council grant.
October 2010: Tudur and Simon gave presentations on simulations of foam rheology at the Society of Rheology Annual Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
September 2010: Simon gave a keynote presentation, "Predicting the response of aqueous foams" in a mini-symposium on Emerging Methodologies in Materials Characterization at the 7th international conference on the Mechanics of Time-Dependent Materials in Portoroz, Slovenia.
August/September 2010: Katie Cavanagh has joined us for a summer project, using the high-speed camera to look at knot breaking and sedimentation in ordered foams.
July 2010: Simon presented our work on minimal perimeter problems at Computers in Scientific Discovery 5, held in Sheffield, UK.
July 2010: EuFoam 2010, probably the biggest foam meeting in the world, was held in Borovets, Bulgaria. Simon gave a talk on topological changes in foam rheology. He and Sian also presented posters, the latter reporting on our work with Procter and Gamble.
May/June 2010: Simon and Sian visited colleagues at the Institute de Physique de Rennes, France, thanks to a British Council grant to jointly investigate contraction flows of foams. Simon gave a talk on "How foams flow".
May 2010: Tudur Davies, who completed his PhD in the group last year, has now returned as a PDRA, working on the project "Modelling and visualization of complex materials", as part of The Research Institute of Visual Computing (RIVIC).
March 2010: Simon travelled to the spectacular location of Banff in Canada for a workshop on Volume Inequalities at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS). He talked about recent work with Edwin Flikkema on the minimal perimeter of confined bubbles.
March 2010: Defects in foams mimic defects in solids: Simon's paper with colleagues in Lisbon is featured in the research highlights of the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.
December 2009: Simon attended the BSR midwinter meeting at Edinburgh University, and gave a talk on the Rheology of Dry Foams.
September 2009: Doris Stingl (Regensburg) has started a one-semester research project on "The effect of non-uniform container shape on foam drainage".
August 2009: Simon was a co-organiser of "Flow of foams", a workshop held at the Lorentz Centre in the Netherlands, 17-21 August 2009.
August 2009: We advertised for a postdoctoral research associate in Modelling and visualization of complex materials.
July 2009: Our three summer students have now finished their various projects. Francois Boulogne (Physics, Paris) showed how a negative lift arises when foams flow past a fixed, asymmetric, obstacle. It is of course the asymmetry that is important, but Francois was able to quantify this in terms of the curvature of the sides of the obstacle. Sam Spencer (2nd year Maths and Physics) performed drainage and stability experiments on foams, to determine the influence of container dimensions and surfactant concentration on foam lifetime. He showed that the effect of evaporation, even on short time-scales, is much larger than we believed. David Ferguson (2nd year MMath) held a Walter Idris summer bursary to investigate minimal perimeter partitions of triangles. In contrast to previous work, he considered arbitrary triangles, and delineated the topologies of the optimal partitions based on the shape of the triangle.
June 2009: Two A-level students, Jessica Mowatt and Jacob Hebditch, visited the group as part of their work experience: "The time we have spent in Aberystwyth University has been an insightful period into the electrifying world of Physics. Our days consisted of high speed photography of rebounding balls, bursting balloons and more, including the mechanisms of a bumble bee's wings (see videos)! We also used a rheometer to measure various properties of different complex liquids (e.g. mayonnaise, toothpaste), such as viscosity, shear strength and elasticity. The week ended with a tour of the various facilities of the department, which proved an exciting and inspiring event. Overall, the experience has been beneficial in understanding what occurs behind closed laboratory doors and has, in no doubt, increased our interest in pursuing a stimulating and enticing career in research."
April 2009: Simon gave a talk at the British Applied Mathematics Colloquium at the beginning of April in Nottingham on Predicting the shape of bubbles moving through narrow channels. This is joint work with Gennady Mishuris and Denis Weaire (Dublin) which will soon be published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
April 2009: The whole group went to Cardiff for the 5th Annual European Rheology Conference. Aled and Tudur presented posters, while Simon co-organised and spoke at a symposium on Interfacial Phenomena, Surfactants and Foams.
April 2009: Simon has been invited to join the council of the British Society of Rheology, and attended his first council meeting in Cardiff.
April 2009: There is a new face in the group: Francois Boulogne is visiting from Paris for three months. He will extend our simulation work on foam flow past obstacles to explore obstacle shapes that are expected to display the phenomenon of negative lift (due to the elasticity of the foam and the asymmetry of the obstacle).
March 2009: Simon travelled to Oslo to give a two-day short course on the Rheology and Structure of High Interface Fluid Systems, with G.G. Fuller (Stanford) and J. Vermant (KU Leuven).
January 2009: Simon travelled to Lisbon at the invitation of Prof. Paulo Teixeira of the Centro de Fisica Teorica e Computacional, Universidade de Lisboa, to give a lecture on "Foams: form and flow". He also pursued collaborative work with Paulo and Prof. M.F. Vaz of Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa. Indeed, while visiting we received the proofs of a joint article on the "Effect of the number of shells on the pressure and energy of two-dimensional free bubble clusters", to appear in Colloids and Surfaces A. We are now introducing controlled topological disorder and investigating its effect in the limit in which the number of bubbles goes to infinity.
October 2008: Simon visited Cape Town, South Africa, to give a plenary at the 2nd Southern African Conference on Rheology. He talked about "Foam rheology in confined geometries: bubble-scale modelling".
September 2008: The foams group hosted a visit by several notable aphrologists, including Weaire (Dublin), Marmottant (Grenoble) and Dollet (Rennes), for informal multi-lateral discussions on numerous projects of mutual interest. These included rheological modelling in the high-velocity limit, higher harmonics in rheometry and experimental investigations of flowing foams.
September 2008: Dr Sian Jones will join the group in September as a PDRA to work on a Procter and Gamble/EPSRC-funded project to investigate the foamability and rheological characteristics of new surfactant mixtures.
September 2008: Congratulations to Tudur for his success in the R M Davies Research Prize competition.
August 2008: Simon gave a Condensed Matter Research Seminar at the University of California at Irvine. Following this, Simon, Aled and Tudur visited Monterey for the XVth International Congress on Rheology, where Simon gave a lecture and everybody else presented posters. Aled Wyn also won an SOR Travel Grant to attend the meeting. Other highlights included the premiere of the INNFM film on "Yield Stress" and two black-footed albatrosses.
July 2008: Simon has been invited to be a specialist advisor for RAE2008 in the area of foam rheology.
July 2008: Simon, Aled and Tudur travelled to the Netherlands for the ninth EuFoam conference, the largest foam meeting in the world. More than one hundred "aphrologists" attended, from both academia and industry. The meeting was hosted by the European Space Agency at ESTEC in the Netherlands. ESA's interest in foams stems from the possibility to generate homogenous aqueous and metallic foams with the use of microgravity research facilities - during processing on earth the liquid in a foam drains out under gravity, leading to a inhomogeneous structure with consequently inhomogeneous properties. Simon gave an invited talk on "Predicting the Bubble-scale Structure and Rheology of Aqueous Foams", while Tudur and Aled presented posters on their PhD work.
May 2008: Tudur Davies has won a Faculty of Science Postgraduate Prize. This will enable him to present a poster on his work on particle sedimentation in foams at this year's EUFoam conference. The conference will be held at ESTEC in the Netherlands at the beginning of July.