Using molecular dynamics simulations, we study the transient response of a binary Lennard-Jones glass subjected to periodic shear deformation. The amorphous solid is modeled as a three-dimensional Kob-Andersen binary mixture at a low temperature. The cyclic loading is applied to slowly annealed, quiescent samples, which induces irreversible particle rearrangements at large strain amplitudes, le...

We show that frustrated creep flows of yield stress fluids give rise to a boundary layer, which takes the form of a liquid region of uniform significant thickness separating two solid regions. In this boundary layer the shear rate is approximately constant for a given flow rate and the layer thickness extremely slowly varies with the flow rate. Yield stress fluids such as concentrated colloids,...

Complex fluids such as emulsions, colloidal gels, polymer or surfactant solutions are all characterized by the existence of a "microstructure" which may couple to an external flow on time scales that are easily probed in experiments. Such a coupling between flow and microstructure usually leads to instabilities under relatively weak shear flows that correspond to vanishingly small Reynolds numb...

We study by means of molecular dynamics simulations of periodic shear cells, the influence of particle shape on the global mechanical behavior of dense granular media. Results at macro-mechanical level show that for large shear deformation samples with elongated particles, independent of their initial orientation, reach the same stationary value for both shear force and void ratio. At the micro...

Metallic glasses are lucrative engineering materials owing to their superior mechanical properties such as high strength and great elastic strain. However, the Achilles' heel of metallic amorphous materials - low plasticity caused by instantaneous catastrophic shear banding, significantly undercut their structural applications. Here, the nanolayered crystalline Cu/amorphous Cu-Zr micropillars w...

The mechanical behavior of a single phase (fcc) Al0.3CoCrFeNi high-entropy alloy (HEA) was studied in the low and high strain-rate regimes. The combination of multiple strengthening mechanisms such as solid solution hardening, forest dislocation hardening, as well as mechanical twinning leads to a high work hardening rate, which is significantly larger than that for Al and is retained in the dy...

Spatially inhomogeneous shear flow occurs in entangled polymer solutions, both as steady state shear banding and transiently after a large step strain or during startup to a steady uniform shear rate. Theoretically, steady state shear banding is a hallmark of models with a nonmonotonic constitutive relation between total shear stress and applied shear rate, but transient banding is sometimes se...