Assembly of vorticity-aligned hard-sphere colloidal strings in a simple shear flow.

ABSTRACT: Colloidal suspensions self-assemble into equilibrium structures ranging from face- and body-centered cubic crystals to binary ionic crystals, and even kagome lattices. When driven out of equilibrium by hydrodynamic interactions, even more diverse structures can be accessed. However, mechanisms underlying out-of-equilibrium assembly are much less understood, though such processes are clearly relevant in many natural and industrial systems. Even in the simple case of hard-sphere colloidal particles under shear, there are conflicting predictions about whether particles link up into string-like structures along the shear flow direction. Here, using confocal microscopy, we measure the shear-induced suspension structure. Surprisingly, rather than flow-aligned strings, we observe log-rolling stri

SUBMITTER: Cheng X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3252901 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature