Lattice Boltzmann simulations of a viscoelastic shear-thinning fluid

Rheology of colloidal and metallic glass formers

Colloidal hard-sphere suspensions are convenient experimental models to understand soft matter, and also by analogy the structural-relaxation behavior of atomic or small-molecular fluids. We discuss this analogy for the flow and deformation behavior close to the glass transition. Based on a mapping of temperature to effective hard-sphere packing, the stress–strain curves of typical bulk metallic glass formers can be quantitatively compared with those of hard-sphere suspensions. Experiments on colloids give access to the microscopic structure under deformation on a single-particle level, providing insight into the yielding mechanisms that are likely also relevant for metallic glasses. We discuss the influence of higher-order angular signals in connection with non-affine particle rearrangements close to yielding. The results are qualitatively explained on the basis of the mode-coupling theory. We further illustrate the analogy of pre-strain dependence of the linear-elastic moduli using data on PS-PNiPAM suspensions.

Rheology of hard glassy materials

Glassy solids may undergo a fluidization (yielding) transition upon deformation whereby the material starts to flow plastically. It has been a matter of debate whether this process is controlled by a specific time scale, from among different competing relaxation/kinetic processes. Here, two constitutive models of cage relaxation are examined within the microscopic model of nonaffine elasto-plasticity. One (widely used) constitutive model implies that the overall relaxation rate is dominated by the fastest between the structural (α) relaxation rate and the shear-induced relaxation rate. A different model is formulated here which, instead, assumes that the slowest (global) relaxation process controls the overall relaxation. We show that the first model is not compatible with the existence of finite elastic shear modulus for quasistatic (low-frequency) deformation, while the second model is able to describe all key features of deformation of 'hard' glassy solids, including the yielding transition, the nonaffine-to-affine plateau crossover, and the rate-stiffening of the modulus. The proposed framework provides an operational way to distinguish between 'soft' glasses and 'hard' glasses based on the shear-rate dependence of the structural relaxation time.

Numerical Investigation of the Effect of Viscoelasticity on Drop Retraction and the Evaluation of Interfacial Tension between Polymer Melts

The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first is to numerically investigate and reveal the effect of polymer viscoelasticity on the retraction of a deformed drop using the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method and polymer kinetic theory. More importantly, the second is to propose a novel method to evaluate the interfacial tension between polymer melts based on the numerical study. Compared with the conventional deformed drop retraction method (DDRM), the present method is designed to greatly reduce the impact of polymer viscoelasticity on measuring interfacial tension. To verify, the interfacial tension between molten PP and POE is evaluated using the proposed method and obviously closer result to the true value is shown.

Multi-scale lattice Boltzmann and mode-coupling theory calculations of the flow of a glass-forming liquid

We present a hybrid-lattice Boltzmann (LB) algorithm for calculating the flow of glass-forming fluids that are governed by integral constitutive equations with pronounced nonlinear, non-Markovian dependence of the stresses on the flow history. The LB simulation for the macroscopic flow fields is combined with the mode-coupling theory (MCT) of the glass transition as a microscopic theory, in the framework of the integration-through transients formalism. Using the combined LB-MCT algorithm, pressure-driven planar channel flow is studied for a schematic MCT model neglecting spatial correlations in the microscopic dynamics. The cessation dynamics after removal of the driving pressure gradient shows strong signatures of oscillatory flow both in the macroscopic fields and the microscopic correlation functions.