PO81 


Poster Session


Elastic characterization of dense colloidal suspensions via droplet impact


October 12, 2022 (Wednesday) 6:30


Poster Session / Riverwalk A

(Click on name to view author profile)

  1. Seper, Brian C. (Northwestern University, Department of Physics and Astronomy)
  2. Shah, Phalguni (Northwestern University, Physics)
  3. Driscoll, Michelle M. (Northwestern University, Physics)

(in printed abstract book)
Brian C. Seper, Phalguni Shah and Michelle M. Driscoll
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208


Seper, Brian C.


colloids; jammed systems; suspensions


Colloidal suspensions display different flow properties depending on the concentration and the magnitude of the applied stress. When placed under large enough stresses at high concentrations, they display exotic behaviors such as shear thickening and shear jamming. Drop impact experiments allow for spatially resolved examinations of the material properties of complex fluids, in contrast to the bulk averaged measurements of conventional rheology. When impacting a surface, a suspension can experience a high enough instantaneous shear rate that the droplet can shear jam and completely solidify over the first few hundred microseconds after impact and re-fluidize over longer timescales, or the drop can rebound from the surface. We use high-speed high-resolution imaging to characterize the elastic modulus of dense colloidal suspensions (volume fractions between 0.48 and 0.51) by measuring the restitution coefficient and contact time of the drop when it bounces from a hydrophobic substrate after impact. We find that the restitution coefficient increases with increasing impact velocity, which implies that the material properties of the transient shear jammed state after impact are determined by the extent to which the impact conditions are beyond the onset of shear thickening.