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Four Thousand Bubbles in Beijing

The newspapers are full of admiration for the Water Cube, the spectacular Aquatic Centre of the Beijing Olympic Games, and they talk of an Irish connection. Whats that all about? Search the Web and you can find out, but here is the full story, in a nutshell.
When the competition for the Olympic buildings was first announced, it was suggested that the building that was to house the swimming pools might somehow symbolise water. An Australian engineer, working for the Arup Corporation, started to play with some ideas on his laptop. Why not bubbles, and so why not a foam structure? The walls could be thick slabs of a foam-like structure, and faced with transparent plastic. Ordinary foams have a complex random structure that hardly appeals to an engineer. The obvious ordered arrangement of equal-sized bubbles, published by Lord Kelvin in 1887, has a very regimented appearance. Might there not be something between these two extremes, practical and appealing to the eye? The engineer soon found that Kelvins structure, which he supposed to have the lowest possible energy, had been 1 supplanted in that role by the discovery in Dublin of a more efficient structure, in 1993. It consists of two kinds of cells (bubbles), that fit together to fill space. This became the basis for the design that won the competition. In addition to its visual appeal, those thick and empty walls offer advantages in heat conservation and sound reduction. The transparent plastic to cover the walls with "cushions", inside and out, is Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene. Covering 110,000 square metres, it reduces heat loss and absorbs solar radiation. About 20 percent of the solar energy falling on the structure is trapped, enabling heating costs to be reduced up to 30 percent and lighting costs cut by up to 55 percent. Its also lightweight, durable and strong. The Water Cube design allows air to circulate through the cushions. The air is regulated and excess heat is transferred to the water for the swimmers below. Air is further recycled both inside and outside the system. This keeps a tight lock on the level of humidity and water temperature inside the pools.
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Contemplating the network of steel beams (12km in all) that makes up the foam structure, you may be tempted to ask what rules are involved and what further alternatives exist. Have a close look at your beer or your bathwater before you try to understand the advice which follows Joseph Plateau, a blind Belgian physicist who lived in the 19th century, taught us the basic rules. A foam without much liquid in it consists of bubbles that take the form of cells with curved faces, which are soap films. The films meet in lines (represented by those beams in Beijing) and the lines must meet four-at-a-time, in junctions. So if you get some tetrahedral bonding units from the chemistry laboratory, you can set out to see what is possible. First try to make something that has only five-sided rings. You will end up looking at a pentagonal dodecahedron. With the freedom to make other rings (and sufficiently flexible units) you can make many other kinds of cells. The simplest just adds two sixfold rings at opposite sides. Now you have two cells, the two ingredients of the Dublin structure. But how do they fit together? At this stage you may be sufficiently intrigued to look in the recently published second edition of Pursuit of Perfect Packing, by Tomaso Aste and Denis Weaire, which recounts this and many other tales of geometry in nature and science. Or perhaps you will be drawn into fascinating experiments on foams, which require only odds and ends of glassware and a bottle of dishwashing fluid. In that case, you could start by consulting the website www.tcd.ie/physics/foams. Just as all the excitement over the Water Cube dies down, something else will spring up in the River Liffey, also incorporating the Dublin structure. It is to be a 48-metre-high human figure, the creation of the sculptor Anthony Gormley. Its interior is filled with cells rather like those of the Water Cube. Indeed Gormley says that the design was inspired by the ideal foam structure, discovered only half a mile away in TCD. Footnote
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Two Irish scientists Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan currently hold the world record (since 1993) for the most efficient ideal foam structure, one with the least possible total surface area of its cells. This was a celebrated problem Lord Kelvin posed in 1887. The WeairePhelan structure is mainly made up of pentagons, with a smaller number of hexagons thrown into the mix.

Denis Weaire, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, a rare honour for an Irishman, in 1999. He was presented with the Royal Irish Academys premier award, the Cunningham Medal, awarded every three years for outstanding contribution to scholarship and the objectives of the Academy in 2005.