Spatio-temporal Measurements of Dynamic Suspensions

Abstract

We present an experimental setup to study the dynamics of colloidal suspensions. Our experiments focus on two systems: one is a simple, Newtonian fluid and another is a colloidal suspension at roughly 20% concentration. In both systems, we use a mechanical syringe pump to move fluid through an aluminum flow cell and make use of traction rheoscopy to measure the viscous shear stresses at the boundary between the soft gel and the fluid. We find that our experimental setup is successful in measuring viscous shear stresses. We also present an image denoising routine that is based on the singular value decomposition and find that it does well at removing background noise in images captured during our experiments.