2018/03/19 by Stefano Aime, Laurence Ramos, Luca Cipelletti · 79 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Chemistry · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Composite material #Coupling (piping) #Deformation (meteorology) #Dynamics (music) #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Mechanics #Physics #Rheology #Shear (geology) #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1717403115
published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115(14), 3587-3592 (National Academy of Sciences)
openalex publication_date 2018/03/19 · arxiv created 2018/04/05 · arxiv updated 2018/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Material failure is ubiquitous, with implications from geology to everyday life and material science. It often involves sudden, unpredictable events, with little or no macroscopically detectable precursors. A deeper understanding of the microscopic mechanisms eventually leading to failure is clearly required, but experiments remain scarce. Here, we show that the microscopic dynamics of a colloidal gel, a model network-forming system, exhibit dramatic changes that precede its macroscopic failure by thousands of seconds. Using an original setup coupling light scattering and rheology, we simultaneously measure the macroscopic deformation and the microscopic dynamics of the gel, while applying a constant shear stress. We show that the network failure is preceded by qualitative and quantitative changes of the dynamics, from reversible particle displacements to a burst of irreversible plastic rearrangements.