Bidisperse and polydisperse suspension rheology at large solid fraction

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 $ϕ_m$. 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 $μ = 0.2$. 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 $δ= 2$ to 4 shows that a minimum in the viscosity occurs for $ζ$ slightly above 0.5, where $ζ= ϕ_l/ϕ$ 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 $ϕ_m$, 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 $ϕ/ϕ_m$ 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