Shear Thickening in Concentrated Soft Sphere Colloidal Suspensions: A Shear Induced Phase Transition

Figure 3

Schematically displayed are the Landau free energies of a stabilized dense suspension in equilibrium near the liquid-solid (coagulation) transition (solid line) and at the critical shear stress (dashed line). Also displayed schematically is the equilibrium phase diagram of electrically stabilized colloidal suspensions as a function of the volume fraction and Debye screening parameter [30–32]. It shows the first order transition lines separating the colloidal vapor, liquid, and solid phase.