The rheology of adhesive hard sphere dispersions

Abstract

The influence of an attractive interparticle potential on the rheology of a sterically stabilized silica dispersion was investigated. Using a marginal solvent, there was an effective attraction between the particles which depended on the temperature. Three experiments in which different properties of the dispersion were probed showed that a square well model can be used to describe the temperature dependence of the pair potential. The turbidity of a dilute dispersion was measured as a function of the volume fraction and the temperature. Using dynamic light scattering techniques, the effect of the strength of the interparticle attraction on the diffusion coefficient was investigated. Furthermore, the steady shear viscosity was measured as a function of the volume fraction and the temperature. A microscopic theory for the low shear viscosity of a semidilute dispersion of adhesive hard spheres was successfully used to determine the interaction parameters. Viscosity measurement on dense suspensions showed that while the system is still in the one-phase state, temporal aggregates are formed by the interparticle forces which are disrupted by both shear and Brownian motion of the particles. The shear thinning behavior of a concentrated dispersion of adhesive hard spheres scales in a dimensionless shear stress. This group is the ratio of the forces, arising from the shear and the interparticle potential.