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Condensed Matter > Soft Condensed Matter
Title: Viscoelastic material properties determine contact mechanics of hydrogel spheres
(Submitted on 24 Mar 2024)
Abstract: Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry; their mechanical behavior has been of academic and engineering interest for centuries. One of the reasons for their rather complex mechanical behavior is that stresses exerted on a granular material propagate only through contacts between the grains. These contacts can change as the packing evolves. This makes any deformation and mechanical response from a granular packing a function of the nature of contacts between the grains and the material response of the material the grains are made of. We present a study in which we isolate the role of the grain material in the contact forces acting between two particles sliding past each other. We use hydrogel particles and find that a viscoelastic material model, in which the shear modulus decays with time, coupled with a simple Coulomb friction model captures the experimental results. The results suggest that the particle material evolution itself may play a role in the collective behavior of granular materials.
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