MSC Seminar. 31/03/2025. Elise Lorenceau (Liphy, Université Grenoble Alpes): “Binary-gases laden foam – Application to foam separation of CO2 and N2”

Aqueous foams are solid materials composed of gas and liquid, with a large gas/liquid surface area. This characteristic favors exchanges between gas and liquid, as well as between gas contained in two adjacent bubbles. The latter phenomenon, known as aqueous foam coarsening, has been extensively studied when the gas consists of a single chemical specie (usually nitrogen). Few studies have investigated the influence of the chemical composition of a mixture of gas on coarsening, whereas gas permeabilities through a soap film can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on the chemical nature of the gas. In this seminar, we discuss several coarsening situations of binary or ternary foams, i.e. those involving a mixture of two or three different gases (nitrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen), and show that in certain configurations such as the one shown in the figure below, foams can be used to dynamically separate the gases, suggesting that they are promising low-cost systems for CO2 capture.