Magneto-Mechanical Enhancement of Elastic Moduli in Magnetoactive Elastomers with Anisotropic Microstructures

Magnetoactive elastomers (MAEs) have gained significant attention in recent years due to their wide range of engineering applications. This paper investigates the important interplay between the particle microstructure and the sample shape of MAEs. A simple analytical expression is derived based on geometrical arguments to describe the particle distribution inside MAEs. In particular, smeared microstructures are considered instead of a discrete particle distribution. As a consequence of considering structured particle arrangements, the elastic free energy is anisotropic. It is formulated with the help of the rule of mixtures. We show that the enhancement of elastic moduli arises not only from the induced dipole–dipole interactions in the presence of an external magnetic field but also considerably from the change in the particle microstructure.

Particle dynamics in drying colloidal solution using discrete particle method

We study particle dynamics in drying colloidal solutions using the numerical simulation with discrete particle method (DPM). Simulations of two different systems were conducted; the drying dynamics of monodispersed and binary mixture of colloidal solution, and compared with those from the previous studies. In the monodispersed colloidal solution, the time evolution of particle concentration profile for varying Péclet number was simulated with the same initial particle concentration. In the binary colloidal solution, when the particle size ratio α is 3, three different stratification modes were observed varying Péclet number and initial particle concentration. By comparison, our method was in a good agreement with the existing methods. Additionally, because of the mesh-based Eulerian approach in our model, other various multi-physical phenomena, such as effect of thermal Marangoni or chemical reaction, can be included in an easy way. From the results, we expect that this work can provide a physical insight for predicting the quality of colloidal drying in a complicated situation.