Optimum dissipation by cruising in dense suspensions

Abstract

Dense suspensions tend to shear jam at large packing fractions. However, it has recently been shown that various oscillation protocols can unjam as well as reduce viscosity and dissipation. In this numerical work, we ask ourselves what is the optimum shear protocol in terms of dissipation. We show that many cruising protocols' dissipation are similar to shear protocols with a steady primary shear and superimposed cross oscillations, even though the latter's viscosity reduction is more considerable. Furthermore, we find that alternating between primary and perpendicular oscillations yields a much higher dissipation than the two protocols mentioned above, yet has similar viscosity as the cross-oscillatory one. While self-organization has been shown to minimize viscosity, our findings challenge the idea that random organization is the underlying mechanism for reducing dissipation. Instead, shear ``fragility'' combined with geometry seems to be the key ingredients, which explains the counter-intuitive decoupling of the minima of viscosity and dissipation for the cruising protocol. This work paves the way for a new class of highly-energy efficient flow protocols.