Effective viscosity of a polydispersed suspension

Abstract

We compute the first order correction of the effective viscosity for a suspension containing solid particles with arbitrary shapes. We rewrite the computation as an homogenization problem for the Stokes equations in a perforated domain. Then, we extend the method of reflections [14,20] to approximate the solution to the Stokes problem with a fixed number of particles. By obtaining sharp estimates, we are able to prove that this method converges for small volume fraction of the solid phase whatever the number of particles. This allows to address the limit when the number of particles diverges while their radius tends to 0. We obtain a system of PDEs similar to the Stokes system with a supplementary term in the viscosity proportional to the volume fraction of the solid phase in the mixture.