Flow of foam past an elliptical obstacle

To investigate the link between discrete small-scale and continuous large scale mechanical properties of a foam, we observe its two-dimensional flow in a channel, around an elliptical obstacle. We measure the drag, lift, and torque acting on the ellipse versus the angle between its major axis and the flow direction. The drag increases with the spanwise dimension, in marked contrast with a square obstacle. The lift passes through a smooth extremum at an angle close to, but smaller than 45°. The torque peaks at a significantly smaller angle 26°. No existing model can reproduce the observed viscous, elastic, plastic behavior. We propose a microscopic visco-elasto-plastic model which agrees qualitatively with the data.