Bidisperse and polydisperse suspension rheology at large solid fraction

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 phi(m). In this work, concentrated or 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 an interparticle friction coefficient of mu = 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 delta = 2-4 shows that a minimum in the viscosity occurs for zeta slightly above 0.5, where zeta = phi(l)/phi 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 the third moment of the size distribution, are simulated and the rheologies are extracted. Prior work has shown that such distributions with equivalent low-order moments have similar phi(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 phi/phi(m) providing excellent agreement with the rheology found in the 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. Microstructural investigations and the stress distribution according to particle size are also presented. (C) 2018 The Society of Rheology.