Yield-stress transition in suspensions of deformable droplets

TL;DR

This study numerically investigates the rheology of deformable droplet suspensions, revealing a yield-stress transition characterized by jamming, ordering, and percolation phenomena, with implications for understanding complex fluid behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed numerical analysis of yield-stress behavior in deformable droplet suspensions, highlighting the role of contact percolation and boundary conditions in the transition.

Findings

Suspensions exhibit yield-stress behavior with a critical force threshold.

Droplets jam into amorphous structures below the threshold and order above it.

Percolation of droplet contacts is key to the yielding transition.

Abstract

Yield-stress materials, which require a sufficiently large forcing to flow, are currently ill-understood theoretically. To gain insight into their yielding transition, here we study numerically the rheology of a suspension of deformable droplets under pressure-driven flow. We show that the suspension displays yield-stress behaviour, with the droplets remaining motionless when the applied body-force is below a critical value. In the non-flowing phase, droplets jam to form an amorphous structure, whereas they order in the flowing phase. Yielding is linked to a percolation transition in the contacts of droplet-droplet overlaps, and requires suitable wetting boundary conditions and strict conservation of the droplet area to exist. Close to the yielding transition, we find strong oscillations in the droplet motion which closely resemble those found experimentally in confined colloidal glasses under flow. We show that even when droplets are static the underlying solvent moves by permeation, so that the viscosity of the composite system is never truly infinite, and, as we discuss, its precise value ceases to be a bulk material property of the system.