Strain hardening in liquid-particle suspensions.
The behavior of a liquid-particle suspension induced to sheared motion was analyzed by numerical simulations. When the velocity (strain) of the suspension began to increase, its viscosity first stayed almost constant, but increased then rapidly to a clearly higher level. This increase in viscosity is shown to be related to formation of clusters of suspended particles. Clusters are shown to increase the viscosity by enhanced momentum transfer though clustered particles. This is the mechanism behind the strain-hardening phenomenon observed in small-strain experiments on liquid-particle suspensions.
Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä, FI-40014 Jyväskylä, Finland.
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