Rheology of a concentrated suspension of spherical squirmers: monolayer in simple shear flow

A concentrated, vertical monolayer of identical spherical squirmers, which may be bottom-heavy, and which are subjected to a linear shear flow, is modelled computationally by two different methods: Stokesian dynamics, and a lubrication-theory-based method. Inertia is negligible. The aim is to compute the effective shear viscosity and, where possible, the normal stress differences as functions of the areal fraction of spheres $phi$, the squirming parameter $beta$ (proportional to the ratio of a squirmers active stresslet to its swimming speed), the ratio $Sq$ of swimming speed to a typical speed of the shear flow, the bottom-heaviness parameter $G_{bh}$, the angle $alpha$ that the shear flow makes with the horizontal, and two parameters that define the repulsive force that is required computationally to prevent the squirmers from overlapping when their distance apart is less than a critical value $epsilon a$, where $epsilon$ is very small and $a$ is the sphere radius. The Stokesian dynamics method allows the rheological quantities to be computed for values of $phi$ up to $0.75$; the lubrication-theory method can be used for $phi> 0.5$. A major finding of this work is that, despite very different assumptions, the two methods of computation give overlapping results for viscosity as a function of $phi$ in the range $0.5 < phi < 0.75$. This suggests that lubrication theory, based on near-field interactions alone, contains most of the relevant physics, and that taking account of interactions with more distant particles than the nearest is not essential to describe the dominant physics.