No Arabic abstract
Recent theories predict that discontinuous shear-thickening (DST) involves an instability, the nature of which remains elusive. Here, we explore unsteady dynamics in a dense cornstarch suspension by coupling long rheological measurements under constant shear stresses to ultrasound imaging. We demonstrate that unsteadiness in DST results from localized bands that travel along the vorticity direction with a specific signature on the global shear rate response. These propagating events coexist with quiescent phases for stresses slightly above DST onset, resulting in intermittent, turbulent-like dynamics. Deeper into DST, events proliferate, leading to simpler, Gaussian dynamics. We interpret our results in terms of unstable vorticity bands as inferred from recent model and numerical simulations.
We study the rheology of cornstarch suspensions, a non-Brownian particle system that exhibits discontinuous shear thickening. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the local properties of the flow are obtained by the determination of local velocity profiles and concentrations in a Couette cell. For low rotational rates, we observe shear localization characteristic of yield stress fluids. When the overall shear rate is increased, the width of the sheared region increases. The discontinuous shear thickening is found to set in at the end of this shear localization regime when all of the fluid is sheared: the existence of a nonflowing region, thus, seems to prevent or delay shear thickening. Macroscopic observations using different measurement geometries show that the smaller the gap of the shear cell, the lower the shear rate at which shear thickening sets in. We, thus, propose that the discontinuous shear thickening of cornstarch suspensions is a consequence of dilatancy: the system under flow attempts to dilate but instead undergoes a jamming transition, because it is confined. This proposition is confirmed by an independent measurement of the dilation of the suspension as a function of the shear rate. It is also explains the MRI observations: when flow is localized, the nonflowing region plays the role of a dilatancy reservoir which allows the material to be sheared without jamming.
We analyse the flow curves of a two-dimensional assembly of granular particles which are interacting via frictional contact forces. For packing fractions slightly below jamming, the fluid undergoes a large scale instability, implying a range of stress and strainrates where no stationary flow can exist. Whereas small systems were shown previously to exhibit hysteretic jumps between the low and high stress branches, large systems exhibit continuous shear thickening arising from averaging unsteady, spatially heterogeneous flows. The observed large scale patterns as well as their dynamics are found to depend on strainrate: At the lower end of the unstable region, force chains merge to form giant bands that span the system in compressional direction and propagate in dilational direction. At the upper end, we observe large scale clusters which extend along the dilational direction and propagate along the compressional direction. Both patterns, bands and clusters, come in with infinite correlation length similar to the sudden onset of system-spanning plugs in impact experiments.
Shear thickening denotes the rapid and reversible increase in viscosity of a suspension of rigid particles under external shear. This ubiquitous phenomenon has been documented in a broad variety of multiphase particulate systems, while its microscopic origin has been successively attributed to hydrodynamic interactions and frictional contact between particles. The relative contribution of these two phenomena to the magnitude of shear thickening is still highly debated and we report here a discriminating experimental study using a model shear-thickening suspension that allows us to tune independently both the surface chemistry and the surface roughness of the particles. We show here that both properties matter when it comes to continuous shear thickening (CST) and that the presence of hydrogen bonds between the particles is essential to achieve discontinuous shear thickening (DST) by enhancing solid friction between closely contacting particles. Moreover, a simple argument allows us to predict the onset of CST, which for these highly-textured particles occurs at a critical volume fraction much lower than that previously reported in the literature. Finally, we demonstrate how mixtures of particles with opposing surface chemistry make it possible to finely tune the shear-thickening response of the suspension at a fixed volume fraction, paving the way for a fine control of shear-thickening transition in engineering applications.
We show that a suspension of non-Brownian calcite particles in glycerol-water mixtures can be tuned continuously from being a yield-stress suspension to a shear-thickening suspension--without a measurable yield stress--by the addition of various surfactants. We interpret our results within a recent theoretical framework that models the rheological effects of stress-dependent constraints on inter-particle motion. Bare calcite particle suspensions are found to have finite yield stresses. In these suspensions, frictional contacts that constrain inter-particle sliding form at an infinitesimal applied stress and remain thereafter, while adhesive bonds that constrain inter-particle rotation are broken as the applied stress increases. Adding surfactants reduces the yield stress of such suspensions. We show that, contrary to the case of surfactant added to colloidal suspensions, this effect in non-Brownian suspensions is attributable to the emergence of a finite onset stress for the formation of frictional contacts. Our data suggest that the magnitude of this onset stress is set by the strength of surfactant adsorption to the particle surfaces, which therefore constitutes a new design principle for using surfactants to tune the rheology of formulations consisting of suspensions of adhesive non-Brownian particulates.
Aqueous suspension of nanoclay Laponite undergoes structural evolution as a function of time, which enhances its elasticity and relaxation time. In this work we employ effective time approach to investigate long term relaxation dynamics by carrying out creep experiments. Typically we observe that the monotonic evolution of elastic modulus shifts to lower aging times while maxima in viscous modulus gets progressively broader for experiments carried out on a later date since preparation (idle time) of nanoclay suspension. Application of effective time theory produces superposition of all the creep curves irrespective of their initial state. The resulting dependence of relaxation time on aging time shows very strong hyper aging dynamics at small idle times, which progressively weakens to demonstrate linear dependence in the limit of very large idle times. Remarkably this behavior of nanoclay suspension is akin to that observed for polymeric glasses. Consideration of aging as a first order process suggests that continued hyper-aging dynamics causes cessation of aging. The dependence of relaxation time on aging time, therefore, must attenuate eventually producing linear or weaker dependence on time in order to approach progressively low energy state in the limit of very large times as observed experimentally. We also develop a simple scaling model based on a concept of aging of an energy well, which qualitatively captures various experimental observations very well leading to profound insight into the hyper-aging dynamics of nano-clay suspensions.