Bidisperse and polydisperse suspension rheology at large solid fraction

TL;DR

This study uses simulations to analyze how bidisperse and polydisperse suspensions behave rheologically at high solid fractions, revealing that size distribution influences viscosity and normal stresses primarily through changes in maximum packing fraction.

Contribution

It demonstrates that polydisperse suspension rheology can be accurately predicted using low-order moments of size distribution and highlights the central role of maximum packing fraction.

Findings

Bidisperse and polydisperse suspensions have lower viscosities than monodisperse ones.

Rheological behavior correlates strongly with the maximum packing fraction ${}_m$.

Normal stress responses are similarly affected by particle size distribution.

Abstract

At the same solid volume fraction, bidisperse and polydisperse suspensions display lower viscosities, and weaker normal stress response, compared to monodisperse suspensions. The reduction of viscosity associated with size distribution can be explained by an increase of the maximum flowable, or jamming, solid fraction ${\phi}_m$. In this work, dense suspensions are simulated under strong shearing, where thermal motion and repulsive forces are negligible, but we allow for particle contact with a mild frictional interaction with interparticle friction coefficient of ${\mu} = 0.2$. Aspects of bidisperse suspension rheology are first revisited to establish that the approach reproduces established trends; the study of bidisperse suspensions at size ratios of large to small particle radii of $\delta = 2$ to 4 shows that a minimum in the viscosity occurs for ${\zeta}$ slightly above 0.5, where $\zeta = {\phi}_l/{\phi}$ is the fraction of the total solid volume occupied by the large particles. The simple shear flows of polydisperse suspensions with truncated normal and log normal size distributions, and bidisperse suspensions which are statistically equivalent with these polydisperse cases up to third moment of the size distribution, are simulated and the rheologies are extracted. Prior work shows that such distributions with equivalent low-order moments have similar ${\phi}_m$, and the rheological behaviors of normal, log normal and bidisperse cases are shown to be in close agreement for a wide range of standard deviation in particle size, with standard correlations which are functionally dependent on ${\phi}/{\phi}_m$ providing excellent agreement with the rheology found in simulation. The close agreement of both viscosity and normal stress response between bi- and polydisperse suspensions demonstrates the controlling influence of the maximum packing fraction in noncolloidal suspensions