Elastic modulus of a colloidal suspension of rigid spheres at rest

Abstract

By modeling a colloidal suspension at rest as a solid, a new expression for the linear elastic modulus is obtained. This estimate is valid for a yield stress colloidal suspension submitted to a small strain. Interestingly, it is also possible to construct an hypothesis allowing one to recover the high-frequency modulus classically found by means of a classical ?fluid approach'. However, in most of the situations, the moduli obtained by the two approaches are different.