Paper Number
SC40
Session
Suspensions & Colloids
Title
Diving into a shear-thickening bath
Presentation Date and Time
October 18, 2018 (Thursday) 8:40
Track / Room
Track 1 / Galleria I
Authors
- Bourrianne, Philippe (MIT, Mechanical Engineering)
- McKinley, Gareth H. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Author and Affiliation Lines
Philippe Bourrianne and Gareth H. McKinley
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139
Speaker / Presenter
Bourrianne, Philippe
Text of Abstract
Shear-thickening fluids, formulated from high volume fraction suspensions of micro or nanoparticles, react to imposed excitations with a tunable behavior. At low shear rates, they flow like a Newtonian or weakly shear-thinning liquid, whereas they rapidly stiffen following a more rapid perturbation. When a solid object impacts a bath of shear-thickening fluid, the initial velocity determines the different settling regimes that are observed. We will describe these different regimes with regard to the rheological properties of the shear-thickening liquid and the characteristics of the impacting object. A few surprising observations could be noticed. First, a high velocity is not always the best way to penetrate such suspensions. Under such conditions, an appropriately-shaped fast-moving object can also bounce during the impact due to the shear-thickening behavior. For those objects that do penetrate the liquid, the sedimentation process may also be discontinuous or exhibit aperiodic oscillations due to dynamical interactions between the timescale characterizing the rate of shear-thickening and the inertia of the sedimenting particle.