https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2017-70079-3
Regular Article
Nonlinear mechanical response of supercooled melts under applied forces
1 Institut für Materialphysik im Weltraum, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR), 51170 Köln, Germany
2 Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz, Germany
3 LPTMS, CNRS & Université Paris-Sud, 91405 Orsay, France
4 Institut für Theoretische Physik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, 40204 Düsseldorf, Germany
a e-mail: thomas.voigtmann@dlr.de
b e-mail: matthias.fuchs@ukn.de
Received: 24 April 2017
Revised: 13 June 2017
Published online: 10 August 2017
We review recent progress on a microscopic theoretical approach to describe the nonlinear response of glass-forming colloidal dispersions under strong external forcing leading to homogeneous and inhomogeneous flow. Using mode-coupling theory (MCT), constitutive equations for the rheology of viscoelastic shear-thinning fluids are obtained. These are, in suitably simplified form, employed in continuum fluid dynamics, solved by a hybrid-Lattice Boltzmann (LB) algorithm that was developed to deal with long-lasting memory effects. The combined microscopic theoretical and mesoscopic numerical approach captures a number of phenomena far from equilibrium, including the yielding of metastable states, process-dependent mechanical properties, and inhomogeneous pressure-driven channel flow.
© EDP Sciences, Springer-Verlag, 2017