Viscoelastic Response of Confined Powder under Large Strain Oscillations, Characterized by Its Noise Temperature

We report a study on granular matter with and without small additions of silicon oil, under low-frequency and large amplitude oscillatory shear strain under constant normal pressure, by running experiments with a rotational rheometer with a cup-and-plate geometry. We analysed the expansion with the Chebyshev polynomials of the orthogonal decomposition of stress–strain Lissajous–Bowditch loops. We found the onset of the strain amplitude for the yielding regime indicated a regime change from filament-like structures of grains to grain rearrangements for the dry granulate and from oscillations to the breaking and regeneration of liquid bridges for wet granulates. We have shown that this viscoelastic dynamics can be characterized by a noise temperature following Sollich et al. (Phys Rev Lett https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.78.2020, 1997). The analysis of the first harmonics of the Chebyshev expansion showed that the state of disorder of dry and wet granular matter in pre-yielding and yielding regimes involved ensembles of different inherent states; thus, each of them was governed by a different noise temperature. The higher-order harmonics of the Chebyshev expansion revealed a proportionality between the viscous nonlinearity and the variation in the elastic nonlinearity induced by the deformation, which shows the coupling between the elastic deformation and the viscous flow of mesoscopic-scale structures.