In a recent Nature Materials article, Brown et al. reported a generality of shear thickening in dense suspensions and demonstrated that shear thickening can be masked by a yield stress and can be recovered when the yield stress is decreased to below a threshold. However, the generality of the shear thickening reported in the article may not be necessary true when a high electric/magnetic field is applied on an ER/MR fluid. Shear thickening of ER fluid and MR fluid under high electric/magnetic fields at low shear rates, indicating an obvious phase change inside the dense suspensions has been observed.
@article{arxiv.1201.0202,
title = {A discussion on "generality of shear thickening in dense suspensions"},
author = {Yu Tian and Yonggang Meng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1201.0202},
year = {2012}
}