A remarkable property of dense suspensions is that they can transform from liquid-like at rest to solid-like under sudden impact. Previous work showed that this impact-induced solidification involves rapidly moving jamming fronts; however, details of this process have remained unresolved. Here we use high-speed ultrasound imaging to probe non-invasively how the interior of a dense suspension responds to impact. Measuring the speed of sound we demonstrate that the solidification proceeds without a detectable increase in packing fraction, and imaging the evolving flow field we find that the shear intensity is maximized right at the jamming front. Taken together, this provides direct experimental evidence for jamming by shear, rather than densification, as driving the transformation to solid-like behaviour. On the basis of these findings we propose a new model to explain the anisotropy in the propagation speed of the fronts and delineate the onset conditions for dynamic shear jamming in suspensions.

We study the fronts that appear when a shear-thickening suspension is submitted to a sudden driving force at a boundary. Using a quasi-one-dimensional experimental geometry, we extract the front shape and the propagation speed from the suspension flow field and map out their dependence on applied shear. We find that the relation between stress and velocity is quadratic, as is generally true for inertial effects in liquids, but with a pre-factor that can be much larger than the material density. We show that these experimental findings can be explained by an extension of the Wyart-Cates model, which was originally developed to describe steady-state shear-thickening. This is achieved by introducing a sole additional parameter: the characteristic strain scale that controls the crossover from start-up response to steady-state behavior. The theoretical framework we obtain unifies both transient and steady-state properties of shear-thickening materials. arXiv:1711.02196v1 [cond-mat.soft]

Dense suspensions of hard particles in a liquid can exhibit strikingly counter-intuitive behavior, such as discontinuous shear thickening (DST) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and reversible shear jamming (SJ) into a state with finite yield stress [9,10,11,12,13]. Recent studies identified a stress-activated crossover from hydrodynamic interactions to frictional particle contacts to be key for these behaviors [2,3,4,6,7,8,10,14]. However, many suspensions exhibit only DST and not SJ. Here we show that particle surface chemistry can play a central role in creating conditions that allow for SJ. We find the system's ability to form interparticle hydrogen bonds when sheared into contact elicits SJ. We demonstrate this with charge-stabilized polymer microspheres and non-spherical cornstarch particles, controlling hydrogen bond formation with solvents. The propensity for SJ is quantified by tensile tests [13] and linked to an enhanced friction by atomic force microscopy. Our results extend the fundamental understanding of the SJ mechanism and open new avenues for designing strongly non-Newtonian fluids.

Unlike dry granular materials, a dense granular suspension like cornstarch in water can strongly resist extensional flows. At low extension rates, such a suspension behaves like a viscous fluid, but rapid extension results in a response where stresses far exceed the predictions of lubrication hydrodynamics and capillarity. To understand this remarkable mechanical response, we experimentally measure the normal force imparted by a large bulk of the suspension on a plate moving vertically upward at controlled velocity. We observe that, above a velocity threshold, the peak force increases by orders of magnitude. Using fast ultrasound imaging we map out the local velocity profiles inside the suspension, which reveal the formation of a growing jammed region under rapid extension. This region interacts with the rigid boundaries of the container through strong velocity gradients, suggesting a direct connection to the recently proposed shear-jamming mechanism.

A key parameter describing the behavior of suspensions is the volume fraction ϕ of the solid particles that are dispersed in the liquid. Obtaining accurate values for ϕ becomes difficult for porous particles, because they can absorb some of the liquid. A prime example are the widely used cornstarch suspensions, for which ϕ usually is only estimated from the mass fraction of particles. Here we present a method to measure the effective porosity and compressibility of porous particles with ultrasound. We obtain the speed of sound in dilute cornstarch suspensions at multiple particle concentrations and with different solvent compressibilities. With the measured particle porosity of 0.31 we are able to calculate the volume fraction of the saturated particles reliably.

Significance While many bacteria can sense the presence of a surface, the mechanical properties of different surfaces vary tremendously and can be as rigid as bone or as soft as mucus. We show that the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa distinguishes surfaces by stiffness and transcriptionally tunes its virulence to surface rigidity. This connection between pathogenicity and mechanical properties of the infection site presents an interesting potential for clinical applications. The mechanism behind stiffness sensing relies on the retraction of external appendages called type IV pili that deform the surface. While this mechanism has interesting parallels to stiffness sensing in mammalian cells, our results suggest that stiffness sensing in much smaller bacterial cells relies on temporal sensing instead of spatial sensing strategies.

Tissue-like materials are required in many robotic systems to improve human-machine interactions.However, the mechanical properties of living tissues are difficult to replicate. Synthetic materials are not usually capable of simultaneously displaying the behaviors of the cellular ensemble and the extracellular matrix. A particular challenge is identification of a cell-like synthetic component which is tightly integrated with its matrix and also responsive to external stimuli at the population level. Here, we demonstrate that cellular-scale hydrated starch granules, an underexplored component in materials science, can turn conventional hydrogels into tissue-like materials when composites are formed. Using several synchrotron-based X-ray techniques, we reveal the mechanically-induced motion and training dynamics of the starch granules in the hydrogel matrix.These dynamic behaviors enable multiple tissue-like properties such as strain-stiffening, anisotropy, mechanical heterogeneity, programmability, mechanochemistry, impact absorption, and self-healability. The starch-hydrogel composites can be processed as robotic skins that maintain these tissue-like characteristics. One-sentence SummaryMechanically programmable granular materials in hydrogels enable tissue-like materials for robotic skins. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Funding:We thank Karen Watters for scientific editing of the manuscript.

No abstract