Using good vibrations: Melting and controlled shear jamming of dense granular suspensions

Abstract

Flows of suspensions can be blocked when the suspended particles are densely packed. This makes their formulation and their transport challenging in the industry. In this paper, we study the impact of vibrations on the behavior of dense granular suspensions prepared at a volume fraction above their jamming volume fraction but below the particle assembly random close packing. Vibrations are shown to have a strong effect on their rheological properties and to tune their transition from solidlike to liquidlike behavior. We study suspensions of rough silica particles in a Newtonian fluid. In the absence of vibrations, they have a solidlike behavior: they flow only above a yield stress. Particles are confined by the liquid interface, and the yield stress is of the frictional origin. When vibrations are applied, the yield stress vanishes to give rise to a liquidlike pseudo-Newtonian behavior at a low shear rate. Using shear-reversal experiments, we show that these liquidlike vibrated suspensions of frictional particles behave like nonvibrated suspensions of frictionless particles. As the shear rate is increased, we observe a shear thickening of the vibrated suspensions, eventually leading to shear-jamming. The yield stress behavior is recovered, and vibrations have no more impact. We show that this shear thickening can be tuned by changing the vibration energy injected into the system. We, finally, propose a physical picture based on the competition between contact opening by vibration and contact formation by shear to account for these behaviors. In the framework of the Wyart and Cates [Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 098302 (2014)] model, vibrations can be seen as introducing a thermal-like repulsive force, yielding a critical stress proportional to the vibration stress introduced by Hanotin et al. [J. Rheol. 59, 253–273 (2015)].