Rheology of Confined Non-Brownian Suspensions

Phys Rev Lett. 2016 Jan 8;116(1):018301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.018301. Epub 2016 Jan 8.

Abstract

We study the rheology of confined suspensions of neutrally buoyant rigid monodisperse spheres in plane-Couette flow using direct numerical simulations. We find that if the width of the channel is a (small) integer multiple of the sphere diameter, the spheres self-organize into two-dimensional layers that slide on each other and the effective viscosity of the suspension is significantly reduced. Each two-dimensional layer is found to be structurally liquidlike but its dynamics is frozen in time.