A new paper was published in Physics of Fluids by Vishnu Sivadasan, Eric Lorenz, Alfons G. Hoekstra, and Daniel Bonn.
Shear thickening of particle suspensions is caused by a transition between lubricated and frictional contacts between the particles. Using three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulations, we study how the interparticle friction coefficient (μm) influences the effective macroscopic friction coefficient (μ) and hence the microstructure and rheology of dense shear thickening suspensions. We propose expressions for μ in terms of distance to jamming for varying shear stresses and μm values. We find μ to be rather insensitive to interparticle friction, which is perhaps surprising but agrees with recent theory and experiments. Unifying behaviors were observed between the average coordination numbers of particles across a wide range of viscous numbers and μm values.
Read further details at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5121536.