Influence of boundary conditions on yielding in a soft glassy material

Abstract

The yielding behavior of a sheared Laponite suspension is investigated within a 1 mm gap under two different boundary conditions. No-slip conditions, ensured by using rough walls, lead to shear localization as already reported in various soft glassy materials. When apparent wall slip is allowed using a smooth geometry, the sample is shown to break up into macroscopic solid pieces that get slowly eroded by the surrounding fluidized material up to the point where the whole sample is fluid. Such a drastic effect of boundary conditions on yielding suggests the existence of some macroscopic characteristic length that could be connected to cooperativity effects in jammed materials under shear.

4 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Yielding and flow in adhesive and non-adhesive concentrated emulsions
• Shear zones and wall slip in the capillary flow of concentrated colloidal suspensions

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Microstructure and Soft Glassy Dynamics of Aqueous Laponite Dispersion
• Understanding rheological hysteresis in soft glassy materials
• Ductile-to-brittle transition and yielding in soft amorphous materials: perspectives and open questions
• Yielding, shear banding and brittle failure of amorphous materials
• Continuum modelling of shear start-up in soft glassy materials
• Interplay between wall slip and shear banding in a thixotropic yield stress fluid
• Shear-driven memory effects in carbon black gels