The effect of elastic walls on suspension flow
Soft Condensed Matter
2019-06-25 v1 Fluid Dynamics
Abstract
We study suspensions of rigid particles in a plane Couette flow with deformable elastic walls. We find that, in the limit of vanishing inertia, the elastic walls induce shear thinning of the suspension flow such that the effective viscosity decreases as the wall deformability increases. This shear-thinning behavior originates from the interactions between rigid particles, soft wall and carrier fluid; an asymmetric wall deformation induces a net lift force acting on the particles which therefore migrate towards the bulk of the channel. Based on our observations, we provide a closure for the suspension viscosity which can be used to model the rheology of suspensions with arbitrary volume fraction in elastic channels.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1906.09893,
title = {The effect of elastic walls on suspension flow},
author = {Marco Edoardo Rosti and Mehdi Niazi Ardekani and Luca Brandt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.09893},
year = {2019}
}