2015-03-18
10:15 at HCI J 574

Towards a constitutive model for supercooled liquids

Ingo Füreder

Polymer Physics, Department of Materials, ETH Zurich

Various soft matter systems (foams, dense emulsions, colloids etc.) show rheological properties similar to those of supercooled liquids. In order to relate structural properties in these materials to dynamical behavior, it appears to be promising to focus on the local potential minima of the system (its inherent structure, IS). Extending previous work on the response of the IS on external perturbation, we identify regions in the system which rearrange in a cooperative manner and are the basis for the description of stress relaxation processes in the system. We will discuss a tentative draft of a simple constitutive model for supercooled liquids and compare it to reference data obtained from nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations.