A further occurrence of ordered columnar arrangement on the macroscale are foam structures confined inside a glass tube. They can be realised experimentally with equal-sized soap bubbles inside a glass tube, produced by blowing air of constant gas flow through a needle dipped in a surfactant solution. By putting the resulting foam column under forced drainage (feeding it with surfactant solution from the top), the foam can be adjusted to either a dry (bubbles shaped as polyhedrons) or wet (spherical bubbles) structure.
Due to this simple experimental set-up, many columnar structures have been discovered and investigated in the context of foams with experiments as well as simulation. Many simulations have been carried out using the Surface Evolver to investigate dry structure or the hard sphere model for the wet limit where the bubbles are spherical.
In the zigzag structure the bubbles are stacked on top of each other in a continuous w-shape. For this particular structure a moving interface with increasing liquid fraction was reported by Hutzler et al. in 1997. This included an unexpected 180° twist interface, whose explanation is still lacking.
The first experimental observation of a line-slip structure was discovered by Winkelmann et al. in a system of bubbles.
Further discovered structures include complex structures with internal spheres/foam cells. Some dry foam structures with interior cells were found to consist of a chain of pentagonal dodecahedra or Kelvin cells in the centre of the tube. For many more arrangements of this type, it was observed that the outside bubble layer is ordered, with each internal layer resembling a different, simpler columnar structure by using X-ray tomography.