Incorporating tunability into a universal scaling framework for shear thickening

TL;DR

This paper extends a universal scaling framework for shear thickening in dense suspensions by incorporating orthogonal shear perturbations, demonstrating how such perturbations can tune shear thickening behavior within the existing model.

Contribution

The authors show that orthogonal shear perturbations can be integrated into the universal scaling framework by modifying the scaling variable, broadening its applicability.

Findings

Orthogonal shear perturbations decrease shear thickening by altering the scaling variable.

The modified framework successfully accounts for flow field complexities.

The approach demonstrates the framework's adaptability to various flow conditions.

Abstract

Recently, we proposed a universal scaling framework that shows shear thickening in dense suspensions is governed by the crossover between two critical points: one associated with frictionless isotropic jamming and a second corresponding to frictional shear jamming. Here, we show that orthogonal perturbations to the flows, an effective method for tuning shear thickening, can also be folded into this universal scaling framework. Specifically, we show that the effect of adding in orthogonal shear perturbations (OSP) can be incorporated by simply altering the scaling variable to include a multiplicative term that decreases with the normalized OSP strain rate. These results demonstrate the broad applicability of our scaling framework, and illustrate how it can be modified to incorporate other complex flow fields.