Other natural patterns occur in foams ; these are packed according to Plateau's laws, which require minimal surfaces. Such foams present a problem in how to pack cells as tightly as possible: in 1887, Lord Kelvin proposed a packing using only one solid, the bitruncated cubic honeycomb with very slightly curved faces. In 1993, Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan proposed the Weaire–Phelan structure, which uses less surface area to separate cells of equal volume than Kelvin's foam.