English

Rheology of confined non-Brownian suspensions

Soft Condensed Matter 2016-01-13 v1

Abstract

We study the rheology of confined suspensions of neutrally buoyant rigid monodisperse spheres in plane-Couette flow using Direct Numerical Simulations. We find that if the width of the channel is a (small) integer multiple of the sphere's diameter, the spheres self-organize into two-dimensional layers that slide on each other and the suspension's effective viscosity is significantly reduced. Each two-dimensional layer is found to be structurally liquid-like but their dynamics is frozen in time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.08722,
  title  = {Rheology of confined non-Brownian suspensions},
  author = {Walter Fornari and Luca Brandt and Pinaki Chaudhuri and Cyan Umbert Lopez and Dhrubaditya Mitra and Francesco Picano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.08722},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

Submitted to PRL. Supplemental Material added as an appendix. Includes links to youtube videos