Mechanical Properties of Colloidal Gels Subject to Particle Rearrangement

In a colloidal suspension with attractive interaction, particles form aggregates that settle to the bottom of the container. As the concentration of particles is increased, the overlapping of the aggregates (flocs) produces a continuous network throughout the suspension before settling occurs and a colloidal gel is formed. Colloidal gels may be divided into hard gels and soft gels.1 Hard gels are those formed by fine particles such as silica or boehmite of about 0.01 µm in size with high interparticle attraction energies. Under small shear rates, there is little restructuring in the gel network. The flocs that pack to form the gel network still retain their fractal structure, which gives rise to the scaling behavior of various mechanical properties of a gel with respect to particle concentration. For example, the storage modulus G' of a hard gel remains constant at small strain and increases in a power-law fashion with particle concentration, (φ, as G' - φn. There can be two regimes, a strong-link regime and a weak-link regime. In both regimes, the exponent n can be expressed in terms of the fractal dimension of the flocs, D, and the fractal dimension of the backbone of the flocs, x, while the form of n depends on what regime the system is in. Furthermore, a gel may crossover from the strong-link regime to the weak-link regime as the particle volume fraction is increased2.