Impact-Activated Solidification of Cornstarch and Water Suspensions

This thesis approaches impact resistance in dense suspensions from a new perspective. The most well-known example of dense suspensions, a mixture of cornstarch and water, provides enough impact resistance to allow a person to run across its surface. In the past, this phenomenon had been linked to "shear thickening" under a steady shear state attributed to hydrodynamic interactions or granular dila...