Non-equilibrium interfacial tension in simple and complex fluids

International audience; In our work we report the measurement of non-equilibrium interfacial tension of polymer and hard sphere suspensions in contact with their own solvent. By visualizing fingering instability (VF) in radial Hele-Shaw geometry, appearing when the solvent displaces suspensions of colloids or polymers, we measure interfacial tensions in function of the volume fraction of the suspended objects, showing that the internal degrees of freedom of the particles drive the low volume fraction behavior (Figure 1). Our results support the existence of a positive tension between miscible fluids, confirm the quadratic scaling predicted by Korteweg [4] for long linear and crosslinked polymers and show a positive rapidly growing tension for hard sphere suspensions up to maximum packing, whose description necessitates a theoretical framework going beyond the classic square gradient model. We rationalize our findings assuming the suspension/solvent interface in local thermodynamic equilibrium, computing explicitly the square gradient contribution to the interfacial tension for polymer/solvent and simple molecular liquid mixtures and proposing a phenomenological model capturing the compositional dependence of the interfacial tension for large concentration gradients. Finally we include and analyze data reported in literature and obtained via spinning drop tensiometry that validate the model and we propose the analysis of fluid dynamic instability as a new tool to probe interfacial stresses.