While the Newtonian fluid and the Hookean solid are the archetypes of respectively usual fluids and solids, many materials such as foams, granular media, colloids, suspensions or pastes display more complex mechanical behaviour. Such materials are ubiquitous e.g. in biology (blood, saliva), in food products (yoghourt, ketchup), in pharmacy (pills), in cosmetics (shampoo, shaving cream), in civil engineering (concrete, bitumen), in geophysics (slurries, lava, snow, sediments).
In this course, we propose in block 1 an introduction to these complex materials, showing that they can be display an amazing variety of intermediate properties between elastic and liquid, and that their microstructure is fundamental to understand and rationalise their properties; examples include foams, granular media, suspensions and polymers. The rest of the course is based on experimental projects, based on simple, table-top experiments with visual observations, on complex materials of the daily life. These projects, often motivated by an industrial or environmental context, are often enriched by bibliographical or modelling approaches.
- Teaching coordinator: Dollet Benjamin
- Teaching coordinator: Séon Thomas
- Teaching coordinator: Thoraval Marie-Jean