Impact-activated solidification of cornstarch and water suspensions

Liquids typically offer little resistance to impacting objects . Surprisingly, dense suspensions of liquids mixed with micron-sized particles can provide tremendous impact resistance, even though they appear liquid like when left at rest or perturbed lightly. The most well-known example is a dense mixture of cornstarch and water, which can easily provide enough impact resistance to allow a full-grown person to run across its surface. Previous studies have linked this so-called ``shear thickening'' to experiments carried out under steady state shear and attributed it to hydrodynamic interactions or granular dilation. However, neither of these explanations alone can account for the stress scales required to keep a running person above the free surface. This thesis investigates the mechanism for this impact resistance in dense suspensions. We begin by studying impact directly and watching a rod as it strikes the surface of a dense suspension of cornstarch and water. Using high-speed video and embedded force and acceleration sensing, we show that the rod motion leads to the rapid growth of a solid-like object below the impact site. With X-ray videography to see the dynamics of the suspension interior and laser sheet measurements of the surface profile, we show how this solid drags on the surrounding suspension, creating substantial peripheral flow and leading to the rapid extraction of the impactor's momentum. Suspecting that the solidification below the rod may be related to jamming of the particle sub-phase, we carry out 2D experiments with macroscopic disks to show how uniaxial compression of an initially unjammed system can lead to dynamic jamming fronts. In doing so, we show how these fronts are sensitive to the system's initial packing fraction relative to the point at which it jams and also discover that the widths of these fronts are related to a diverging correlation length. Finally, we take these results back to the suspension, where we perform careful, speed-controlled impact to probe the packing fraction dependence. The solidification we observe in these experiments is consistent with what we see in the 2D experiments, giving further support that the impact response of dense suspensions is caused by dynamic jamming fronts.