Manuscript to appear in Rheologica Acta, Special Issue: Eugene C. Bingham paper centennial anniversary Version: February 7, 2017 Mapping Thixo-Visco-Elasto-Plastic Behavior Randy H. Ewoldt Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA Gareth H. McKinley Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA Abstract A century ago, and more than a decade before the term rheology was formally coined, Bingham introduced the concept of plastic flow above a critical stress to describe steady flow curves observed in English china clay dispersion. However, in many complex fluids and soft solids the manifestation of a yield stress is also accompanied by other complex rheological phenomena such as thixotropy and viscoelastic transient responses, both above and below the critical stress. In this perspective article we discuss efforts to map out the different limiting forms of the general rheological response of such materials by considering higher dimensional extensions of the familiar Pipkin map. Based on transient and nonlinear concepts, the maps first help organize the conditions of canonical flow protocols. These conditions can then be normalized with relevant material properties to form dimensionless groups that define a three-dimensional state space to represent the spectrum of Thixotropic Elastoviscoplastic (TEVP) material responses. *Corresponding authors:
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[email protected] 1 Introduction One hundred years ago, Eugene Bingham published his first paper investigating “the laws of plastic flow”, and noted that “the demarcation of viscous flow from plastic flow has not been sharply made” (Bingham 1916). Many still struggle with unambiguously separating such concepts today, and indeed in many real materials the distinction is not black and white but more grey or gradual in its characteristics.