Abstract
The prediction of the viscosity of suspensions is of fundamental importance in several fields. Most of the available studies have been focused on particles with simple shapes, for example, spheres or spheroids. In this work, we study the viscosity of a dilute suspension of fractal-shape aggregates suspended in a shear-thinning fluid by direct numerical simulations. The suspending fluid is modeled by the power-law constitutive equation. For each morphology, a map of particle angular velocities is obtained by solving the governing equations for several particle orientations. The map is used to integrate the kinematic equation for the orientation vectors and reconstruct the aggregate orientational dynamics. The intrinsic viscosity is computed by a homogenization procedure along the particle orbits. In agreement with previous results on Newtonian suspensions, the intrinsic viscosity, averaged over different initial orientations and aggregate morphologies characterized by the same fractal parameters, decreases by increasing the fractal dimension, that is, from rod-like to spherical-like aggregates. Shear-thinning further reduces the intrinsic viscosity showing a linear dependence with the flow index in the investigated range. The intrinsic viscosity can be properly scaled with respect to the number of primary particles and the flow index to obtain a single curve as a function of the fractal dimension.
Highlights
Suspensions of solid particles are encountered in a variety of industrial and biological systems
We study the viscosity of a dilute suspension of fractal-shape aggregates suspended in a shear-thinning fluid by direct numerical simulations
We investigate the rheology of a dilute suspension of aggregates with complex shape suspended in a shear-thinning fluid by direct numerical simulations
Summary
Suspensions of solid particles are encountered in a variety of industrial and biological systems. The knowledge of the viscosity and, more in general, of the rheological properties of these materials is fundamental for correctly designing the processing stage and predicting the hydrodynamic resistance. It is well-known that the addition of solid particles in a fluid increases the viscosity as compared with the suspending liquid [1]. For randomly-oriented particles, integration of the instantaneous intrinsic viscosity for several initial orientations over the corresponding orbits leads to an average value of B higher than the Einstein’s coefficient for both prolate and oblate spheroids [7]
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