Tuesday, 26 June 2007 - 11:20 AM
Clayton 101B
224

Rate of structural arrest in nanocolloidal suspensions undergoing gelation and aging

Hongyu Guo, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Subramanian Ramakrishnan, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, Brian Chung, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, Charles F. Zukoski, University of Illinois, James L. Harden, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada, and Robert L. Leheny, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

We report a combined x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) and rheometry study of the evolution of concentrated suspensions of nanometer-scale colloids undergoing gelation and aging. The suspensions are comprised of silica colloids, 45 nm in diameter, coated with octadecyl-hydrocarbon chains in decalin. At high temperatures the chains form a solvated brush that stabilizes the colloids. At low temperature, the brush collapses leading to a weak, temperature-dependent, short-range attraction between the colloids that drives a reversible ergodic to nonergodic transition in the suspensions. Following a quench through this transition, the shear modulus grows exponentially with a time constant that depends strongly on temperature. XPCS measurements following such a quench characterize the evolution of the intermediate scattering function at wave vectors corresponding to interparticle length scales. The intermediate scattering function displays two features, a plateau value that provides information about constrained local dynamics in the suspensions and a terminal relaxation time that provides information about relaxation of residual stress. Both the plateau value and the terminal relaxation time increase exponentially following the quench with a time constant that closely matches the value for the growing shear modulus. Thus, a comparison between XPCS and rheometry indicates how the arrest of the particle-scale dynamics correlates with the growth in elasticity. Further, a comparison of intermediate scattering functions for suspensions with colloidal volume fractions ranging from 0.20 and 0.43 shows a qualitative variation in the temporal evolution that indicates a crossover from gel-like to glass-like dynamical arrest with increasing volume fraction.