Rheological aspects of the solid-liquid transition in jammed systems

A common property of jammed systems is a yield stress they have to overcome in order to start to flow. In rheology it is generally assumed that the corresponding solid-liquid transition is continuous, the steady state viscosity progressively decreasing from infinity to a finite value as the applied shear stress is increased beyond the yield stress. Recent experiments with various materials such as colloidal suspensions, foams, emulsions, or polymer gels, show that this transition is in fact abrupt: in steady state, at a critical stress the material viscosity abruptly turns from infinity to a finite value. This phenomenon corresponds to another effect observed from MRI-rheometry tests: in steady state such pasty materials either flow at a sher rate larger than a critical, finite value, associated to a critical stress, or do not flow at all. This phenomenon has also a dynamic character, which is in particular illustrated by the "viscosity bifurcation" in time under controlled stress: below the critical stress value the shear rate progressively decreases until reaching stoppage; beyond this critical stress the shear rate increases and reaches a finite value. Moreover for a material initially at rest the interface between the sheared and unsheared regions, i.e. the slope break, progressively reaches its asymptotic position in time. From these results we deduce that usual macroscopic observations basically reflect complex space and time evolutions of flow and material characteristics in the rheometer gap, rather than local time-dependent properties. © Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg 2006.