Title:	Quantifying the destructuring of a thixotropic colloidal suspension using falling ball viscometry
Authors:	Biswas, Rajkumar Saha, Debasish Bandyopadhyay, Ranjini
Issue Date:	Jan-2021
Publisher:	American Institute of Physics
Citation:	Physics of Fluids, 2021, Vol 33, p 013103-1 - 013103-9
Abstract:	The settling dynamics of falling spheres inside a Laponite suspension is studied. Laponite is a colloidal synthetic clay that shows physical aging in aqueous suspension due to the spontaneous evolution of inter-particle electrostatic interactions. In our experiments, millimeter-sized steel balls are dropped in aqueous Laponite suspensions of different ages (i.e., time elapsed since sample preparation). The motion of the falling balls are captured using a high-speed camera and the velocities of their centroids are estimated from the images. Interestingly, we observe that balls of larger diameters fail to achieve terminal velocity over the entire duration of the experiment. We propose a mathematical model that accounts for rapid structural changes (expected to be induced by the falling ball) in Laponite suspensions whose aging time scales are much slower than the time of fall of the ball. For a range of ball sizes and Laponite suspension ages, our model correctly predicts the time-dependence of the ball velocity. Furthermore, fits to our model allow us to estimate the rates of destructuring of the thixotropic suspensions due to the passage of the falling ball
Description:	Restricted Access. An open-access version is available at arXiv.org (one of the alternative locations)
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/2289/7658
ISSN:	1070-6631 1089-7666 (online)
Alternative Location:	https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0035093?af=R&feed=most-recent https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.10755 https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0035093
Copyright:	© 2021 Author(s).
Appears in Collections:	Research Papers (SCM)

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