Please take a few seconds to allow this gif to load, it’s a large file. When it loads, you’ll see a two-dimensional foam after applying a uniform heat of 40 deg. C to one of the plates. It’s sped up; the process below took about a half minute. Also, this is just a subset of the entire plate, which has dimensions 8 inches by 10 inches. The entire plate contains about 5,000 grains, and that number could be ramped up easily by just using larger plates if necessary.

What you see is an actual, physical foam, but the images used here have been processed with watershedding and skeletonizing for cleaner edge detection. If you are a student or researcher interested in working on this project, please send me an email! I have a thousand questions I’d like to sort out regarding computational, theoretical, and experimental aspects of foam generation, and not nearly enough time to tackle them all.