Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Onset of Fluidization in Yield Stress Materials: Insights from microscopic simulations

Suman Dutta

IMSc

Yield stress materials are responsive to applied stress. When impacted by the imposition of stress, they yield beyond a critical threshold. We take such solids of different preparation history to study the mechanical response using creep, implemented via the molecular dynamics simulations. We analyze the microscopic dynamics and investigate the onset of flow and the persistence of spatial heterogeneity at different imposed stresses. We identify distinct regions of fluidity via the local fluidization maps and show how increasing spatial fluctuations between the flowing and non-flowing regions lead to macro-scale flow.