Anomalous Shear Stress Growth During Relaxation of a Soft Glass

TL;DR

This study reveals that soft glassy fluids can retain and exhibit directional rheological signatures from past shear history, leading to nonmonotonic stress relaxation behaviors explained by a simple elastoplastic model.

Contribution

It introduces a new elastoplastic rheological model that reproduces complex stress responses without thixotropy or shear-banding, highlighting the role of residual anisotropy in stress growth.

Findings

Residual anisotropy drives stress increase during relaxation.

Effects persist even after exceeding the yield stress.

Model reproduces experimental nonmonotonic stress behaviors.

Abstract

We show experimentally that multiple soft glassy fluids are capable of storing directional rheological signatures from past shear history, evidenced during stress growth and overall nonmonotonic stress relaxation after small steps in strain. We illustrate theoretically that these responses can be reproduced without requiring thixotropy or shear-banding, which are typically implicated in time-dependent rheological complexities, but by using a simple elastoplastic rheological model with power-law yielding (EP-PLY) that incorporates a distribution of local strain states. Using insight from the model, we suggest a mechanism for the experimentally observed stress increase to be driven by residual anisotropy in strain states that are relaxed at different rates. We demonstrate that these effects persist even after material is stressed beyond the yield stress, indicating that past deformation may have more influence than previously thought.