Shear-induced ordering and crystallization of jammed suspensions of soft particles glasses

F Khabaz and TF Liu and M Cloitre and RT Bonnecaze, PHYSICAL REVIEW FLUIDS, 2 (2017).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.2.093301

The microstructure and shear rheology of highly concentrated, jammed suspensions of soft particles are shown to depend on polydispersity and shear rate from computational simulations. Rich behavior is observed depending on the degree of polydispersity and the shear rate. Glassy suspensions with a low degree of polydispersity evolve to face-centered cubic and hexagonal close-packed structures at low and high shear rates, respectively. The structural rearrangement occurs over several units of strain and reduces the shear stress and elastic energy. Suspensions with a higher degree of polydispersity exhibit a microstructural transition from a glass to a layeredlike structure for sufficiently high shear rates. In this case, the soft particles first rearrange themselves in the flow-vorticity plane during an induction time (or strain) before layers parallel to the flow-vorticity plane are formed. The induction strain decays exponentially with shear rate revealing that the devitrification of monodisperse and polydisperse suspensions is a shear- activated process. Finally, a generic dynamical state diagram is found that depends on the polydispersity and the ratio of viscous to elastic forces due to shear.

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