Economically and environmentally improving industrial foams through reduced fuel consumption and emissions

Foams and emulsions are fairly common in nature and frequently appear in man-made products aiming at specific properties for targeted applications. This covers many industries, for example the food and drink industry (the EU's biggest manufacturing sector in terms of jobs and value added) and the chemical industry (including areas such as paints, coatings, surface treatments, advanced polymers, personal care products, detergents etc.). The production of foams and emulsions and their stability still pose problems with many facets, of which only some are understood so far. Understanding the mechanics of all phenomena influencing stability/instability in foams and emulsions is a prerequisite to efficiently developing more advanced products and applications. Systematic studies on Earth are complicated by the influence of gravity. ESA research on the ISS has uncovered many mechanisms involved in foams/emulsions stability, undertaken with industrial partners from different industries, which are feeding into industrial planning and process as well as future research. Nestlé has demonstrated a strong interest in low gravity experimentation with research scientists involved in this research area with ESA in the last few years. Nestlé is still interested in the investigation of the stabilisation and destabilisation process of food formulations and some key-information can only be obtained in low-gravity conditions, both in parabolic flights and on the ISS. As an example a deep understanding of the mechanism of action of a specific surfactant in an aerated product would help to optimise recipe, process and eventually taste or shelf-life. Microgravity experiments will help to clarify the impact of the liquid drainage around the air bubbles in the coarsening mechanism. In addition, emulsions as well as granular matter also are fields of active research at Nestle, where future collaboration can be expected with the Soft Matter Dynamics science team. Loufakis Chemicals is specifically interested in a better understanding of the effects and phenomena occurring when adding engineered particles to polymeric emulsions (Nano latexes) used for protective coatings and in which droplet coalescence is one of the important processes involved in the formation of the coating film. This will allow them to improve the performance of their commercial polymeric emulsions, adapting concepts and also procedures that may emerge as a result of the space projects. In fact, due to the need for more environmental friendly products and the guidelines of the European Union to stop the use of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in paint formulations (Directive 2004/42/EC), the company is investigating latex-based emulsion coatings that emit less organic solvents into the atmosphere. For example it was previously believed that gravity-driven drainage was the most important cause of destabilisation of metallic foams. However an ESA experiment contradicted this generally accepted understanding and the corresponding models through observing a foam of a molten alloy using X-ray radiography where no drainage could take place. This new knowledge obtained from ESA research on metallic foams enabled the design, and patenting, of a new industrial process and new alloys that deliver stable homogeneous foams. Production has already started and the applicability to advanced very light-weight vehicle structures is subject of a European project involving car manufacturers. This will have a positive impact both economically and environmentally through reduced fuel consumption/emissions. New questions identified in this field, both with metallic and polymeric foams, are also being tackled in the ESA programme with the support of focused ground and space experiments.