Shaping complex fluids-How foams stand up for themselves.

Being able to model at what point a yield stress material starts to flow under its own weight is of great importance for many practical applications. However, describing the deformation of yield stress fluids under gravity is anything but a simple exercise due to the feedback between the shape of the deposited material and the locally acting stresses. In this article, we concentrate on a specific aspect of this problem: What is the maximum height of a pile of a yield stress fluid which can be obtained under gravity? For this purpose we use the example of liquid foams in which the yield stress is strongly coupled to the bubble size and the liquid fraction. We show that a good agreement between models and experiments is obtained over a wide parameter range in two limiting cases: When the yield stress is either higher or much lower than the normal stresses encountered in the material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]