And you thought doing soft particle mechanics is relaxing?

The deformability of particles affects the bulk behavior of their packings. For example, when compressive stresses applied to a packing become similar to the moduli of the particles in the packing, new bulk material behavior appears. In this webinar we will discuss experimental examples of such effects. Studies on "soft" particle packings such as hydrogel spheres reveal that by compressing them, we can see their relaxation behavior. Surprisingly, this relaxation dynamics is not always the same as the microscopic relaxation timescale in the hydrogel itself. Shearing such particles reveals such intrinsic viscoelastic behavior, but also compression at the single grain level. Relaxation dynamics at the particle scale may so be responsible for slow bulk relaxation dynamics such as creep, also observed in hydrogel particle packings. We will discuss some recent published and unpublished work on this topic