No Arabic abstract
The complexity of the interactions between the constituent granular and liquid phases of a suspension requires an adequate treatment of the constituents themselves. A promising way for numerical simulations of such systems is given by hybrid computational frameworks. This is naturally done, when the Lagrangian description of particle dynamics of the granular phase finds a correspondence in the fluid description. In this work we employ extensions of the Lattice-Boltzmann Method for non-Newtonian rheology, free surfaces, and moving boundaries. The models allows for a full coupling of the phases, but in a simplified way. An experimental validation is given by an example of gravity driven flow of a particle suspension.
Granular fronts are a common yet unexplained phenomenon emerging during the gravity driven free-surface flow of concentrated suspensions. They are usually believed to be the result of fluid convection in combination with particle size segregation. However, suspensions composed of uniformly sized particles also develop a granular front. Within a large rotating drum, a stationary recirculating avalanche is generated. The flowing material is a mixture of a visco-plastic fluid obtained from a kaolin-water dispersion, with spherical ceramic particles denser than the fluid. The goal is to mimic the composition of many common granular-fluid materials, like fresh concrete or debris flow. In these materials, granular and fluid phases have the natural tendency to segregate due to particle settling. However, through the shearing caused by the rotation of the drum, a reorganization of the phases is induced, leading to the formation of a granular front. By tuning the material properties and the drum velocity, it is possible to control this phenomenon. The setting is reproduced in a numerical environment, where the fluid is solved by a Lattice-Boltzmann Method, and the particles are explicitly represented using the Discrete Element Method. The simulations confirm the findings of the experiments, and provide insight into the internal mechanisms. Comparing the time-scale of particle settling with the one of particle recirculation, a non-dimensional number is defined, and is found to be effective in predicting the formation of a granular front.
Dynamic particle-scale numerical simulations are used to show that the shear thickening observed in dense colloidal, or Brownian, suspensions is of a similar nature to that observed in non-colloidal suspensions, i.e., a stress-induced transition from a flow of lubricated near-contacting particles to a flow of a frictionally contacting network of particles. Abrupt (or discontinuous) shear thickening is found to be a geometric rather than hydrodynamic phenomenon; it stems from the strong sensitivity of the jamming volume fraction to the nature of contact forces between suspended particles. The thickening obtained in a colloidal suspension of purely hard frictional spheres is qualitatively similar to experimental observations. However, the agreement cannot be made quantitative with only hydrodynamics, frictional contacts and Brownian forces. Therefore the role of a short-range repulsive potential mimicking the stabilization of actual suspensions on the thickening is studied. The effects of Brownian and repulsive forces on the onset stress can be combined in an additive manner. The simulations including Brownian and stabilizing forces show excellent agreement with experimental data for the viscosity $eta$ and the second normal stress difference $N_2$.
Electrical conductivity is an inherent property of a hydrophobic porous media (HPM) and has critical applications. This research aims to provide a solution for predicting the electrical conductivity of nanoscale HPM with heterogeneous pore structure. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are compared with the modified Poisson-Boltzmann (MPB) model for understanding ionic charge density distributions in nanopores. The effective medium approximation (EMA) participates in calculating the effective conductance and conductivity of the nanoscale HPM. The results show that the surface charge density affects the ionic density profiles in the hydrophobic nanopores. As the pore size increases, the conductance increases. As the molarity of the aqueous electrolyte solution (AES) decreases, the conductance decreases. A phenomenon related to the conductance saturation occurred when the molarity of AES is very low. The effective conductance of an HPM increase as the coordination number increases. Finally, based on the calculated effective conductance and the heterogeneous pore structure parameters, the electrical conductivity of a nanoscale HPM is calculated.
Particle-based simulations of discontinuous shear thickening (DST) and shear jamming (SJ) suspensions are used to study the role of stress-activated constraints, with an emphasis on resistance to gear-like rolling. Rolling friction decreases the volume fraction required for DST and SJ, in quantitative agreement with real-life suspensions with adhesive surface chemistries and rough particle shapes. It sets a distinct structure of the frictional force network compared to only sliding friction, and from a dynamical perspective leads to an increase in the velocity correlation length, in part responsible for the increased viscosity. The physics of rolling friction is thus a key element in achieving a comprehensive understanding of strongly shear-thickening materials.
Near field hydrodynamic interactions are essential to determine many important emergent behaviors observed in active suspensions, but have not been successfully modeled so far. In this work we propose an effective model capable of efficiently capturing the essence of the near field hydrodynamic interactions, validated numerically by a pedagogic model system consisting of an E. coli and a spherical tracer. The proposed model effectively captures all the details of near field hydrodynamics through only a tensorial coefficient of resistance, which is fundamentally different from, and thus cannot be replaced by, an effective interaction of conservative nature. In a critical test case that studies the scattering angle of the bacterium-tracer pair dynamics, calculations based on the proposed model reveals a region in parameter space where the bacterium is trapped by the spherical tracer, a phenomenon that is regularly observed in experiments but cannot be explained by any existing model.