We’ve all experienced it at one point or another, you’ve just fixed yourself the perfect cup of coffee and within the short walk from your counter to your kitchen table your caffeinated concoction starts sloshing and splashing over the sides of the mug. This doesn’t happen when you order a foamy latte or cappuccino at your local café, so why is it occurring in your kitchen?

Alban Sauret noticed a similar phenomenon while in a pub during his time as a Ph.D student in the south of France. Observing that his beer spilled much less easily than a glass of water, Sauret—with a team of fluid physicists from Princeton University and the École Normale Superieure de Cachan in France—decided to determine the cause.  

Using water laced with glycerol (for thickening) and detergent, the physicists built a mechanism that pumped air into the mixture, creating a layer of bubbles (replicating the foamy head on a pint of beer). They then gently shook the container to generate the waves that occur when the glass is moved and captured the motion with a high-speed camera. The bubbles seemed to grip the sides of the glass, capping the liquid and helping to keep it within the container. They also found that the foam on top of the glass dampened the waves by as much as 90 percent. You can view a diagram of their setup here: http://www.inquisitr.com/1873033/beer-foam-prevents-spillage-scientists/.

So what happens when you want to look at how fluids move in a container that’s larger than a pint glass, for example, a 5-gallon water jug? Or what about an entire pallet of beverage bottles or cans in transport? This is where SIMULIA can help realistically simulate fluid flow under various conditions.

Capable of co-simulating fluid-structure interaction, Abaqus/CFD is ideal for analyzing the interactions between liquids and their packaging while in motion. Its scalability allows for a comparison of container and content behavior with any size and shape. Tosca fluid is another option for studying CFD since it generates innovative ideas based on the space available and requires no initial design and is ideal for industrial large scale models with arbitrary, complex design spaces.  As always, these SIMULIA tools lead to optimum results with a greatly reduced need for prototyping.

Understanding how liquids react under certain parameters and in specific containers will not only help keep  coffee in your cup, but can also have a huge impact on the transportation and consumer packaged goods industries. With the help of Abaqus and/or Tosca, an optimized solution can be determined both quickly and cost-effectively.