# Difference between revisions of "Spatial cooperativity in soft glassy flows"

## Reference

Goyon, J., Colin, A., Ovarlez, G., Ajdari, A., Bocquet, L., Nature 454 (2008).

## Keywords

spatial cooperativity, glass, velocity profile, shear stress, shear strain, Couette cell, Herschel-Bulkley model

## Summary

Figure 1.
Figure 2.

A general feature of glassy materials is a strong nonlinear flow rule relating stress and strain. This feature is no well-documented and poorly understood. Many have tried to understand the glass transition by studying the dynamical heterogeneities in glass-forming materials, but how these heterogeneities affect flow remains unclear. Using a local velocity measurement technique, the authors study the local flow of a film of confined glassy material.

The authors test flow in two main geometries: shear planar flow in a wide gap Couette cell, and pressure driven planar flow in a narrow microchannel (tens of hundreds micrometers in width). The substance tested was an emulsion of silicone droplets (6.5um in diameter) in a glycerine-water mixture. The local flow curves, which relate the local shear stress $\sigma$ to the local shear rate $\dot{\gamma}$, are obtained from the measured velocity profiles of both geometries. Figure 1 shows the results for the wide-gap Couette cell, and Figure 2 shows the results for the narrow microchannel. Evidently, the flow curve is highly dependent on the geometry. In the wide-gap case, the curve follows the Herschel-Bulkley model. However, in the microchannel setup, the data does not follow a single rheological curve. The finite-size effect in the microchannel setup which did not appear in the wide-gap setup suggests that there are extended spatial correlations in the system.

The authors checked that the change in rheology is not caused by a structural change in the emulsion, nor a change in density, nor boundary effects. In order to explain this finite-size effect, they developed a model considering the plastic rearrangements that occur in concentrated emulsions. In Conceptually, localized plastic events induce a non-local, long-range elastic relaxation of the stress over the system. The rate of plastic rearrangements $v$ is equivalent to a fluidity $f$ defined as $\sigma = (1/f)\dot{\gamma}$. In the absence of non-local effects, the fluidity reduces to the bulk fluidity $f_bulk = \dot{\gamma}/\sigma_bulk$, but to take into account the non-local effects, the fluidity is assumed to be of the form

$f(z)=f_{bulk}+\xi^2 \frac{\partial^2f(z)}{\partial^2 z}$.

In the above, $\xi$ denotes a "flow cooperativity length." This equation was solved numerically using appropriate boundary conditions. Surprisingly, the authors found that a unique flow cooperativity length accurately describes all the microchannel data, even across different shear velocities.