Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Rheology aims at quantifying the response of materials to mechanical forcing. However, standard rheometers provide only global macroscopic quantities, such as viscoelastic moduli. They fail to capture the heterogeneous flow of soft amorphous materials at the mesoscopic scale, arising from the rearrangements of the microstructural elements, that must be accounted for to build predictive models. To address this experimental challenge, we have combined shear rheometry and time-resolved X-ray micro-tomography on 3D liquid foams used as model soft jammed materials, yielding a unique access to the stresses and contact network topology at the bubble scale. We reveal a universal scaling behavior of the local stress build-up and relaxation associated with topological modifications. Moreover, these plastic events redistribute stress non-locally, as if the foam were an elastic medium subjected to a quadrupolar deformation. Our findings clarify how the macroscopic elastoplastic behavior of amorphous materials emerges from the spatiotemporal stress variations induced by microstructural rearrangements.
Source: Nature Communications
Institutions: Lund University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique, Université Grenoble Alpes, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS de Lyon, Paul Scherrer Institute, Swiss Light Source, Université Côte d'Azur, Institut de Physique de Nice, Institut Universitaire de France, Technical University of Denmark
Language: English
Subfield: Fluid Flow and Transfer Processes
Field: Chemical Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,990
OpenAlex ID: W4415261209