Bridging from particle to macroscopic scales in uniaxial magnetic gels

TL;DR

This paper develops a method to connect microscopic particle models with macroscopic descriptions of uniaxial magnetic gels, aiding the understanding of their properties across different length scales.

Contribution

It introduces a procedure to determine macroscopic material parameters from a mesoscopic particle-resolved model for magnetic gels.

Findings

Material parameters are derived from mesoscopic models.

The approach bridges microscopic and macroscopic descriptions.

It complements existing scale-bridging efforts.

Abstract

Connecting the different length scales of characterization is an important, but often very tedious task for soft matter systems. Here we carry out such a procedure for the theoretical description of anisotropic uniaxial magnetic gels. The so-far undetermined material parameters in a symmetry-based macroscopic hydrodynamic-like description are determined starting from a simplified mesoscopic particle-resolved model. This mesoscopic approach considers chain-like aggregates of magnetic particles embedded in an elastic matrix. Our procedure provides an illustrative background to the formal symmetry-based macroscopic description. There are presently other activities to connect such mesoscopic models as ours with more microscopic polymer-resolved approaches; together with these activities, our study complements a first attempt of scale-bridging from the microscopic to the macroscopic level in the characterization of magnetic gels.