Time Temperature Superposition in Soft Glassy Materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that time-temperature superposition can be applied to soft glassy materials by extending the effective time framework, allowing prediction of rheological behavior across timescales based on temperature-dependent relaxation times.

Contribution

It extends the effective time framework to enable time-temperature superposition in soft glassy materials, linking relaxation time variations with temperature without altering spectral shape.

Findings

Successful application of time-temperature superposition to clay suspension.

Relaxation time varies with temperature, enabling predictions across timescales.

Superposition holds when relaxation spectrum shape remains unchanged.

Abstract

Soft glassy materials are out of thermodynamic equilibrium and show time dependent slowing down of the relaxation dynamics. Under such situation these materials follow Boltzmann superposition principle only in the effective time domain, wherein time dependent relaxation processes are scaled by a constant relaxation time. In this work we extend effective time framework to successfully demonstrate time - temperature superposition of creep and stress relaxation data of a model soft glassy system comprised of clay suspension. Such superposition is possible when average relaxation time of the material changes with time and temperature without affecting shape of the spectrum. We show that variation in relaxation time as a function of temperature facilitates prediction of long and short time rheological behavior through time - temperature superposition from the experiments carried out over experimentally accessible timescales.