Interplay between shear loading and structural aging in a physical gel

Abstract

We show that the aging of the mechanical relaxation of a gelatin gel exhibits the same scaling phenomenology as polymer and colloidal glasses. Besides, gelatin is known to exhibit logarithmic structural aging (stiffening). We find that stress accelerates this process. However, this effect is definitely irreducible to a mere age shift with respect to natural aging. We suggest that it is interpretable in terms of elastically-aided elementary (coil$\to$helix) local events whose dynamics gradually slows down as aging increases geometric frustration.

References in corpus (3)

• Solvent control of crack dynamics in a reversible hydrogel
• From thermally activated to viscosity controlled fracture of biopolymer hydrogels
• Mechanical rejuvenation and over-aging in the soft glassy rheology model

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• Glass-like dynamics of the strain-induced coil/helix transition on a permanent polymer network
• Fluctuations in an aging system: absence of effective temperature in the sol-gel transition of a quenched gelatin sample