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Liquid foams

Liquid foams can be used in fire retardant foam, such as those that are used in extinguishing fires, especially oil fires.

The dough of leavened bread has traditionally been understood as a closed-cell foam— yeast causing bread to rise via tiny bubbles of gas that become the bread pores —where the cells do not connect with each other. Cutting the dough releases the gas in the bubbles that are cut, but the gas in the rest of the dough cannot escape. When dough is allowed to rise too far, it becomes an open-cell foam, in which the gas pockets are connected; cutting the dough surface at that point would cause a large volume of gas to escape, and the dough to collapse. Recent research has indicated that the pore structure in bread is 99% interconnected into one large vacuole, thus the closed-cell foam of the moist dough is transformed into an open cell solid foam in the bread.

The unique property of gas-liquid foams having very high specific surface area is exploited in the chemical processes of froth flotation and foam fractionation.