The Little Book of Irish Science SFI Little Book of Irish Science | Page 24

19
The Perfect Foam
In 1880 Belfast-born scientist Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
pondered some pretty deep problems. One such problem
was what the lowest energy structure of a liquid foam of
equal size bubbles might be. In the 1990s, scientists Denis
Weaire and Robert Phelan at Trinity College Dublin came
up with a structure that improved upon Kelvin’s solution.
This complex Weaire-Phelan structure was the
inspiration for the Water Cube aquatic centre at the
Beijing Olympics. In 2011, Italian scientist Ruggero
Gabbrielli, working with a team at Trinity, announced he
had designed a container that could accommodate the
Weaire-Phelan bubbles, and this allowed the creation of
the perfect foam in the laboratory.
www.tcd.ie