Abstract
Complex colloidal fluids, depending on constituent shapes and packing fractions, may have a wide range of shear-thinning and/or shear-thickening behaviors. An interesting way to transition between different types of such behavior is by infusing complex functional particles that can be manufactured using modern techniques such as 3D printing. In this paper, we perform 2D molecular dynamics simulations of such fluids with infused star-shaped functional particles, with a variable leg length and number of legs, as they are infused in a non-interacting fluid. We vary the packing fraction () of the system, and for each different system, we apply shear at various strain rates, turning the fluid into a shear-thickened fluid and then, in jammed state, rising the apparent viscosity of the fluid and incipient stresses. We demonstrate the dependence of viscosity on the functional particles’ packing fraction and we show the role of shape and design dependence of the functional particles towards the transition to a shear-thickening fluid.
Highlights
Academic Editors: Shinichi Tashiro, Antonio Lamura and Andrei V
We identified the key features related to jamming, to draw conclusions related to the shear stresses, pressure, viscosity and diffusivity of our system, which vary with applied strain rates as well as the packing fraction of the infused functional star particles
We demonstrated, by using MD simulations, how shear thickening takes place in systems of fluid-like stochastic rotation dynamics (SRD) particles with infused star-shaped functional particles and variable leg numbers as well as leg lengths
Summary
Academic Editors: Shinichi Tashiro, Antonio Lamura and Andrei V. In practice, with common fluids and macroscopic components, using a variable viscosity concept might not be possible or would be difficult to implement in several cases. For this reason, magnetorheological (MR) [1,2] and electrorheological (ER) [3,4,5,6,7,8] fluids have emerged, which have the ability to control the fluid viscosity with external magnetic and electric fields, respectively. A continuous control of the viscosity would require additives, when using a common fluid [9,10,11] but without applying external force fields. In this paper we focus on simulations of controlling the fluid viscosity [12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
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