Flow of dense suspensions is at the core of industrial technologies for cements and pastes, drilling and recovery, personal care and chemical products, slurry and powders. The flow-property transitions of these suspensions, much like classical phase behavior in material physics, have enormous practical relevance, as they determine the processing conditions for a material in engineering contexts. The key question is how interactions between microscopic constituents give rise to a macroscopic transition, while the specific transition strongly depends upon the external forcing. The development of a statistical mechanics framework is crucial for a quantitative understanding of a wide range of mechanical instabilities that arise when the solid volume fraction is high and the deformation rate change, from the shear banding associated with yielding to discontinuous shear thickening.

The conference will bring together statistical physicists, material scientists, engineers and mathematicians to discuss the rheological behavior of dense suspensions in contexts (flow geometries, deformation rates) relevant to technological applications of materials ranging from compressed emulsions to colloids and grains; the nanoscale and microscale origin of such rheology; the development of constitutive models able to capture non-linearities, leading to non-monotonic flow curves and able to bridge the nanoscale physics to the mechanics and flow properties, and ultimately to the macroscopic engineering problems.

PLEASE NOTE: During the conference there will be an opportunity to present a poster. If you are interested in presenting a poster please visit the conference website and submit your title and abstract. Each poster board is 4 feet high x 6 feet wide. We ask that the posters be no larger than 44 inches high x 34 inches wide at the most. December 15 deadline for the poster submission.

Invited Speakers

• Dan Blair - Georgetown University
• Eric Brown - Yale University
• Daniel Bonn - University of Amsterdam
• John Brady - Caltech
• Bulbul Chakraborty - Brandeis Univ.
• Itai Cohen - Cornell University
• Michel Cloitre - ESPCI
• Annie Colin - ESPCI
• Luca Cipelletti - Université de Montpellier
• Thibaut Divoux - MIT - CNRS
• Douglas Durian - UPENN
• Jay Fineberg - Weizmann Institute
• Elisabeth Guazzelli - Université Aix-Marseille
• Ben Guy - University of Edinburgh
• Pascal Hebraud - Universite de Strasbourg
• Sarah Hormozi - Ohio University
• Lilian Hsiao - NC State
• Steve Hudson - NIST
• Lucio Isa - ETHZ
• Heinrich Jaeger - University of Chicago
• Tonya Kuhl - UC Davis
• Romain Mari - Université Grenoble Alpes
• Sebastien Manneville - ENS Lyon
• Kirsten Martens - Universite Grenoble-Alpes
• Gareth Mc Kinley - MIT
• Jeff Morris - City College New York
• Guillaume Ovarlez - CNRS - Solvay - Universite de Bordeaux
• Roland Pellenq - MIT
• George Petekidis - FORTH Crete
• Kabir Ramola - Brandeis Univ.
• John Royer - University of Edinburgh
• Mark Robbins - Johns Hopkins University
• Sri Sastry - JNCASR
• Ajay Sood - Indian Institute of Science and Technology
• Nicholas Spencer - ETHZ
• Jim Swan - MIT
• Alban Sauret - Saint-Gobain
• Matthieu Wyart - EPFL
• Norman Wagner - University of Delaware

Poster Presenters

• Charles Lieou
• Rahul Chacko
• Gengxin Liu
• Meera Ramaswamy
• Endao Han
• Hiizu Nakanishi
• Ryohei Seto
• Frédéric Blanc
• Magali Le Goff
• James Richards
• Nicole James
• Jean Comtet
• Luca Brandt
• Gustaf Mårtensson
• Nesrin Senbil
• Tingato Zhou
• Vishnu Sivadasan