Transition from granular to Brownian suspension : an inclined plane experiment

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates the flow behavior of micron-sized dense granular suspensions on inclined planes, revealing size-dependent flow profiles and developing a rheological model incorporating thermal and athermal effects.

Contribution

It introduces a new experimental approach using confocal microscopy to analyze micron-sized suspensions and proposes a phenomenological model combining thermal and athermal contributions.

Findings

Flow profiles depend on particle size.

Small particles flow at very low inclinations.

The model predicts a glassy friction angle lower than the granular one.

Abstract

We experimentally revisite the flow down an inclined plane of dense granular suspensions, with particles of sizes in the micron range, for which thermal fluctuations cannot be ignored. Using confocal microscopy on a miniaturized set-up, we observe that, in contrast with standard granular rheology, the flow profiles strongly depend on the particles size. Also, suspensions composed of small enough particles flow at infinitesimal inclinations. From the velocity measurements, an effective rheology is extracted in terms of a friction coefficient as a fonction of the dimensionless shear rate (the viscous number), and of the particle pressure normalized by the thermal pressure. Inspired by a previous work [1], a phenomenological model based on the sum of a thermal contribution describing the glass transition and an athermal contribution capturing the jamming transition is developed, which reproduces well the experimental observations. The model predicts the existence of a glassy friction angle lower than the granular athermal friction angle, a signature of the glass transition in the framework of a pressure imposed rheology.