Non-locality and viscous drag effects on the shear localisation in soft-glassy materials

We study the Couette flow of a quasi-2d soft-glassy material in a Hele-Shaw geometry. The material is chosen to be above the jamming point, where a yield stress $σ_Y$ emerges, below which the material deforms elastically and above which it flows like a complex fluid according to a Herschel-Bulkley (HB) rheology. Simultaneously, the effect of the confining plates is modelled as an effective linear friction law, while the walls aside the Hele-Shaw cell are sufficiently close to each other to allow visible cooperativity effects in the velocity profiles (Goyon et al., Nature 454, 84-87 (2008)). The effects of cooperativity are parametrized with a steady-state diffusion-relaxation equation for the fluidity field $f = \dotγ/σ$, defined as the ratio between shear rate $\dotγ$ and shear stress $σ$. For particular rheological flow-curves (Bingham fluids), the problem is tackled analytically: we explore the two regimes $σ\gg σ_Y$ and $σ\approx σ_Y$ and quantify the effect of the extra localisation induced by the wall friction. Other rheo-thinning fluids are explored with the help of numerical simulations based on lattice Boltzmann models, revealing a robustness of the analytical findings. Synergies and comparisons with other existing works in the literature (Barry et al., Phil. Mag. Lett. 91, 432-440 (2011)) are also discussed.

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