Inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials with tunable attractive forces

TL;DR

This study uses molecular dynamics simulations to explore how attractive forces influence inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials, revealing that attractions amplify flow heterogeneities and affect stress relaxation near the yield stress.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of how attractive forces alter shear flow in jammed materials, offering a new understanding beyond previous qualitative models.

Findings

Flow inhomogeneities increase at low shear rates.

Attractive forces enhance flow heterogeneities.

Inhomogeneities occur within a specific stress window.

Abstract

We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft particles, both for purely repulsive interactions and in the presence of an additional short-range attraction of varying strength. In steady state, pronounced flow inhomogeneities emerge for all systems when the shear rate becomes small. Deviations from linear flow are stronger in magnitude and become very long-lived when the strength of the attraction increases, but differ from permanent shear-bands. Flow inhomogeneities occur in a stress window bounded by the dynamic and static yield stress values. Attractive forces enhance the flow heterogeneities because they accelerate stress relaxation, thus effectively moving the system closer to the yield stress regime where inhomogeneities are most pronounced. The present scenario for understanding the effect of particle adhesion on shear localization, which is based on detailed molecular dynamics simulations with realistic particle interactions, differs qualitatively from previous qualitative explanations and ad-hoc theoretical modelling.