1. Foam characteristics

1.1 Industrial importance

Foams can be found in a wide range of products and circumstances [9][10] . They are often desirable as packaging vehicles in the agri-food, hygiene and health sectors, cleaning products, insulating materials (thermal, electrical or acoustic). They are also used in highly specialized applications requiring unique properties, such as textile dyeing, decontamination (nuclear or other), drilling muds and fire extinguishing fluids. In other cases, foams are sometimes undesirable, particularly in industrial processes such as papermaking, fermentations, fractional distillation and most product blending operations....