Shear Banding of Complex Fluids

TL;DR

This review discusses recent advances in understanding shear banding phenomena in complex fluids, focusing on polymeric and soft glassy materials, highlighting similarities, differences, and new insights gained through advanced probing techniques.

Contribution

It synthesizes recent research on shear banding across different complex fluids, emphasizing new experimental techniques and comparative analysis.

Findings

Shear banding occurs in various complex fluids with distinct characteristics.

Advanced techniques reveal detailed flow structures and dynamics.

Similarities and disparities between polymeric and soft glassy materials are highlighted.

Abstract

Even in simple geometries many complex fluids display non-trivial flow fields, with regions where shear is concentrated. The possibility for such shear banding has been known since several decades, but the recent years have seen an upsurge of studies offering an ever more precise understanding of the phenomenon. The development of new techniques to probe the flow on multiple scales and with increasing spatial and temporal resolution has opened the possibility for a synthesis of the many phenomena that could only have been thought of separately before. In this review, we bring together recent research on shear banding in polymeric and on soft glassy materials, and highlight their similarities and disparities.