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New Electric-Field-Driven Mesoscale Phase Transitions in Polarized Suspensions

2005; American Physical Society; Volume: 95; Issue: 25 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevlett.95.258301

1092-0145

Anil Kumar, Boris Khusid, Zhiyong Qiu, Andreas Acrivos,

Material Dynamics and Properties

We report the discovery of a new class of an electric field-driven bulk phase transition due solely to dipolar interactions in a suspension under the action of a uniform ac field where the effects of other competing forces are suppressed. This transition appears after the well-known chain-column formation and causes the uniform suspension of columns to rearrange into a cellular pattern consisting of particle-free domains surrounded by particle-rich walls. Interestingly, the characteristic size of these domains scales linearly with the interelectrode spacing and remains insensitive to the size of the particles.