Scaling relationships between viscosity and diffusivity in shear-thickening suspensions

Abstract

Dense suspensions often exhibit a dramatic response to large external deformation. The recent body of work has related this behavior to transition from an unconstrained lubricated state to a constrained frictional state. Here, we use numerical simulations to study the flow behavior and shear-induced diffusion of frictional non-Brownian spheres in two dimensions under simple shear flow. We first show that both viscosity η and diffusivity D/ of the particles increase under characteristic shear stress, which is associated with lubrication to frictional transition. Subsequently, we propose a one-to-one relationship between viscosity and diffusivity using the length scale ξ associated with the size of collective motions (rigid clusters) of the particles. We demonstrate that η and D/ are controlled by ξ in two distinct flow regimes, i.e. in the frictionless and frictional states, where the one-to-one relationship is described as a crossover from D/ ∼ η (frictionless) to η^1/3 (frictional). We also confirm that the proposed power laws are insensitive to the interparticle friction and system size.