# Shear banding in large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOStrain and LAOStress) of soft glassy materials

## TL;DR

This paper theoretically investigates shear banding phenomena in soft glassy materials under large amplitude oscillatory shear flows, revealing persistent banding even at low frequencies and its impact on rheological measurements.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that shear banding occurs in soft glassy materials during oscillatory flows across various protocols, even when steady state models predict monotonic behavior.

## Key findings

- Shear banding persists at low frequencies in oscillatory shear.
- Banding influences the shape of Lissajous-Bowditch curves.
- Shear banding occurs in both yield stress and power law fluids.

## Abstract

We study theoretically shear banding in soft glassy materials subject to large amplitude time-periodic shear flows, considering separately the protocols of large amplitude oscillatory shear strain, large amplitude square or triangular or sawtooth strain rate, and large amplitude oscillatory shear stress. In each case, we find shear banding to be an important part of the material's flow response for a broad range of values of the frequency $\omega$ and amplitude of the imposed oscillation. Crucially, and highly counterintuitively, in the glass phase this persists even to the lowest frequencies accessible numerically (that seems consistent with it persisting even when $\omega\to 0$), although the soft glassy rheology model we use has an underlying monotonic constitutive curve of shear stress as a function of shear rate, and is therefore unable to support shear banding as its steady state response at constant shear rate. We attribute this to the repeated competition, within each flow cycle, of glassy aging and flow rejuvenation. Besides reporting significant banding in the glass phase, where the flow curve has a yield stress, we also observe it at noise temperatures just above the glass point, where the flow curve is of power law fluid form. Thus, our results suggest a predisposition to shear banding in flows of even extremely slow time-variation, for both aging yield stress fluids, and for power law fluids with sluggish relaxation timescales. We show that shear banding can have a pronounced effect on the shape of the Lissajous-Bowditch curves that are commonly used to fingerprint complex fluids rheologically. We therefore counsel caution in seeking to compute such curves calculations that impose upfront a homogeneous shear flow, discarding the possibility of banding. We also analyze the stress response to the imposed strain waveforms in terms of a `sequence of physical processes'.