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Coarsening of a Quiescent Electrorheological Fluid I: Experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2011

James E. Martin
Affiliation:
Advanced Materials Physics Division, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185
Judy Odinek
Affiliation:
Advanced Materials Physics Division, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87185
Thomas C. Halsey
Affiliation:
The James Franck Institute and Department of Physics, The University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637
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Abstract

We report a real-time, two-dimensional light scattering study of the evolution of structure in a concentrated electrorheological fluid during the ‘liquid-solid’ phase transition. We find that after particle chaining along the electric field lines, strong light scattering lobes appear at a finite scattering wavevector q orthogonal to the field lines, and then brighten as they move to q=0. This indicates the existence of an unstable concentration fluctuation that signifies the segregation of chains into columns. In fact, the observed growth kinetics of the characteristic length, as well as the form of the structure factor, are qualitatively similar to two-dimensional spinodal decomposition in a system with a conserved order parameter.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Materials Research Society 1993

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