Abstract
Thoroughly mixing immiscible fluids creates droplets of one phase dispersed in a continuum of the other phase. In such emulsions, the individual droplets have rather mundane mechanical behavior. However, densely confining these suspended droplets generates a packing of particles with a spectacular diversity of mechanical behavior whose origins we are only beginning to understand. This mini review serves to survey a non-exhaustive range of experimental dense slow flow emulsion work. To embed these works in the context of the flow behavior of other structured fluids, we also discuss briefly the related non-local flow modeling attempts as one of the approaches that has been used successfully in describing emulsion flow properties and other materials.
Highlights
The mechanical behavior of fluids with an embedded “granular” phase is varied and complex [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
We review here some experimental and modeling work on the slow flow behavior of emulsions, as it can serve as a model system for a wide range of disordered materials that are composed of a mix of a background fluid and particles
The role of the many microscopic ingredients that determine the flow behavior has been captured in the review by Höhler and Cohen-Addad [33], such as interfacial energy, capillary pressure, long range molecular interactions, entropic effects and interfacial rheology; different surfactants can for example change the exponent n in the fast flow limit
Summary
The mechanical behavior of fluids with an embedded “granular” phase is varied and complex [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Think of the flow behavior of mayonnaise, a mixture of oil droplets in water Such dense emulsions are highly viscous and even a bit elastic: they are so-called “yield stress” fluids and only flow when they are exposed to a stress above a certain level. All these systems have similarities that suggest underlying commonalities. When driving a sample of a structured fluid very slowly and at high volume fraction, interactions between particles are long-lived and the material acts as a solid. The richness in macroscopic flow behavior of structured fluids with long lived contacts is complemented with a diversity of their microscopic behavior. Emulsions have a number of physico-chemical ingredients that allows one to tune their microscopic and macroscopic properties
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