Off-equilibrium surface tension in driven colloidal and polymer suspensions
Résumé
We report the measurement of non-equilibrium interfacial tension of polymer and hard sphere suspensions in contact with their own solvent. By visualizing fingering instability (VF) in radial Hele-Shaw geometry, we measure interfacial tension in function of the volume fraction of the suspensions showing that the internal degrees of freedom of the particles drive the magnitude of such tension. We rationalize our findings proposing a phenomenological model capturing the compositional dependence of the non equilibrium interfacial tension for the whole range of concentration gradients and for all the systems at hand. More generally we propose the analysis of fluid dynamic instabilities as a new tool to measure interfacial tensions between complex fluids.