English

Rheological response of soft Solid/Liquid Composites

Soft Condensed Matter 2025-10-31 v3

Abstract

Understanding a material's dissipative response is important for their use in many applications, such as adhesion or fracture resistance. In dispersions, the interplay between matrix and inclusions complicates any description. Fractional rheology is conveniently used to fit the storage and loss moduli of complex materials. In conjugation with superposition methods, they allow to better capture the behavior of materials of complex rheology. We study the rheology of soft solid/liquid composites of liquid poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) droplets in a soft poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) matrix. We analyze the influence of the droplets through fractional rheology and a time-concentration superposition in the continuous-phase-dominated region. Viscous dissipation increases proportionally with volume fraction, independently of the frequency, whereas the elastic response is almost unchanged.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.11750,
  title  = {Rheological response of soft Solid/Liquid Composites},
  author = {Elina Gilbert and Christophe Poulard and Anniina Salonen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11750},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

20 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:47:06.817Z