Effect of temperature on aging and time–temperature superposition in nonergodic laponite suspensions

We have studied the effect of temperature on the aging dynamics of laponite suspensions by carrying out the rheological oscillatory and creep experiments. We observed that at higher temperatures the mechanism responsible for aging became faster thereby shifting the evolution of elastic modulus to lower ages. Significantly, in the creep experiments, all the aging time and the temperature dependent strain data superposed to form a master curve. The possibility of such a superposition suggests that the rheological behavior depends on the temperature and the aging time only through the relaxation processes and both the variables do not affect the distribution but only the average value of the relaxation times. In addition, this procedure allows us to predict long time rheological behavior by carrying out short time tests at high temperatures and small ages.