Shear-induced structuration of confined carbon black gels: Steady-state features of vorticity-aligned flocs

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates shear-induced vorticity alignment in confined carbon black gels, revealing that pattern wavelength scales linearly with gap width and identifying a critical shear rate beyond which structuration ceases.

Contribution

It provides a systematic experimental analysis of the steady-state features of vorticity-aligned flocs, including their dependence on gap width, shear rate, and gel concentration, and introduces a scaling law for the critical shear rate.

Findings

Pattern wavelength depends linearly on gap width

Vorticity-aligned floc width equals gap width and is independent of other parameters

Critical shear rate scales as gap width to the power of -1.4

Abstract

Various dispersions of attractive particles are known to aggregate into patterns of vorticity-aligned stripes when sheared in confined geometries. We report a thorough experimental investigation of such shear-induced vorticity alignment through direct visualization of carbon black gels in both simple plane shear and rotational shear cells. Control parameters such as the gap width, the strain rate, and the gel concentration are systematically varied. It is shown that in steady states the wavelength of the striped pattern depends linearly on the gap width $h$ while being insensitive to both the gel concentration $C$ and the shear rate $\gp$. The width of the vorticity-aligned flocs coincides with the gap width and is also independent of $C$ and $\gp$, which hints to a simple picture in terms of compressible cylindrical flocs. Finally, we show that there exists a critical shear rate $\gp_c$ above which structuration does not occur and that $\gp_c$ scales as $h^{-\alpha}$ with $\alpha=1.4\pm 0.1$ independently of $C$. This extensive data set should open the way to quantitative modelling of the vorticity alignment phenomenon in attractive colloidal systems.