Soft matter systems are disordered materials intermediate between a Newtonian liquid and a crystalline solid. Depending on the perturbation time scales, they can show fluid-like and solid-like properties. Dense Suspensions, formed by dispersing solid particles in Newtonian fluids in high proportion, form an important class of soft materials that has drawn significant research attention in recent years. These systems serve as a model system for jammed materials to study various complex out of equilibrium phenomena like landslides and earthquakes. These materials also have huge application-potential in designing smart and adaptive materials.

In this thesis, we study the flow and deformation properties of athermal jammed systems formed by dense suspensions of adhesive granular particles using rheology and in-situ imaging. We correlate the yielding behavior with the inter particle rearrangements and shear banding in the system. We also propose a generalized yielding phase diagram that depends on various critical jamming volume fractions measured directly from the particle settling experiments. Next, we study the memory formation in these systems. Remarkably, we show that, an encoded memory can tune the shear modulus of the system significantly. We probe shear-thickening and shear-induced jamming in dense suspensions. We propose a way to predict the transition from fluid-like shear thickened state to a solid-like shear-jammed state. We finally investigate the tuning of yield stress and shear-thickening properties in dense particulate systems using superposed orthogonal vibrations.