Rheology of Soft Particle Pastes

Soft particle pastes are deformable particles that are randomly and densely packed. They can exhibit both “solid like” and “liquid like” properties depending on the time scale of deformation. Due to their special rheological properties, they are widely used in food and cosmetics processing, surface coating, and construction and drilling industry. Our group has built a three-dimensional micromechanical model (shown in figure below) and quantitatively explained their nonlinear behavior shown in experiments through microstructural analysis [1]. My project is focused on developing more simulation tools to understand and predict the flow behavior of soft particle pastes, especially in wall-slip flow.

Figure 1. Left: Simulation box for soft jammed glasses. Center: Particle contact interactions. Right: Simulation predictions for the flow curve (line) and comparison to experiments (symbols)

[1] Seth, J.R., Mohan, L., Locatelli-Champagne, C., Cloitre, M., Bonnecaze, R.T. (2011), A micromechanical model to predict the flow of soft particle glasses. Nature Materials, 10 (11) 838-843