2010-06-09
10:15 at HCI J 574

Soft Glassy Materials

Maryam Naderian

University of Konstanz

We encounter directly or indirectly ’soft glassy materials’ in our life in the form of complex fluids, foams, pastes, or creams. The common aspect of these everyday materials is that they are made of building blocks at the mesoscopic length scale. The investigation of their dynamic properties, especially in rheological aspects can give a significant insight into a broad range of important questions in material science. In this talk I will introduce the soft glassy rheology approach (SGR) [Sollich 1997] based on Bouchaud’s trap model. This model attributes the similarities in the rheology of soft glassy materials to their common properties, namely structural disorder and metastability. It conceptually subdivides the system into mesoscopic elements and captures interactions by a mean field noise temperature, x and an energy landscape. Glass transition occurs at x ~ 1 (in proper units). I will present the prediction of SGR for linear rheology and flow curves of systems which were observed in many experimental results.