Highly stable and efficient electrorheological suspensions with hydrophobic interaction.

HYPOTHESIS:Electrorheological fluid (ERF) is a kind of suspension or colloid composed of fine particles and insulating oil as continuous phase. The second miscible liquid phase with less affinity to the particles than the continuous phase is expected to influence particles aggregation, assembly and spanning mesostructures. Hence, it should be possible to tune the rheological and electrorheological properties and stability by the addition of second miscible liquid with different chain length and substituents. EXPERIMENTS:We developed a giant ERF (GERF) with a binary liquid phase (BLP) by the addition of alkane to the silicone oil continuous phase. We studied the shear stress and viscosity under different shear rates, thixotropy and particle size distributions of these suspensions and characterized the concentration variation of GERFs under quiescent conditions by measuring the backscattering light intensity variation through vertical scanning. FINDINGS:The dispersed particle size distribution is broadened, which produces higher static yield stress and lower zero-field viscosity than those of a single-liquid-phase GERF. The ER efficiency is much higher with the addition of alkane, reaching 10656, which is 1.8 times larger than that of single-liquid-phase suspensions. We performed 100-day stability testing and found that the GERF with 1-phenyldodecane showed excellent stability and performance.