New device to measure dynamic intrusion/extrusion cycles of lyophobic heterogeneous systems.

Lyophobic heterogeneous systems (LHS) are made of mesoporous materials immersed in a non-wetting liquid. One application of LHS is the nonlinear damping of high frequency vibrations. The behaviour of LHS is characterized by P - ΔV cycles, where P is the pressure applied to the system, and ΔV its volume change due to the intrusion of the liquid into the pores of the material, or its extrusion out of the pores. Very few dynamic studies of LHS have been performed until now. We describe here a new apparatus that allows us to carry out dynamic intrusion/extrusion cycles with various liquid/porous material systems, controlling the temperature from ambient to 120 °C and the frequency from 0.01 to 20 Hz. We show that for two LHS: water/MTS and Galinstan/CPG, the energy dissipated during one cycle depends very weakly on the cycle frequency, in strong contrast to conventional dampers.