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Simulations of a heavy ball falling through a sheared suspension

Townsend, AK; Wilson, HJ; (2017) Simulations of a heavy ball falling through a sheared suspension. Journal of Engineering Mathematics , 107 (1) pp. 179-200. 10.1007/s10665-017-9935-5. Green open access

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Abstract

In recent experiments, Blanc et al. (J Fluid Mech 746:R4, 2014) dropped a heavy sphere through a concentrated suspension of smaller, neutrally buoyant particles. They found that the application of a lateral oscillatory shear flow caused the heavy ball to fall faster on average, and that for highly concentrated suspensions, at certain moments of the cycle of shear oscillation, the heavy ball moved upwards. We use Stokesian Dynamics to model these experiments and other related scenarios. We show how the motion of the heavy particle and the microstructure of the suspension depend on two key dimensionless parameters: the frequency of the oscillations (relative to a typical settling time) and the strength of repulsive interparticle forces, relative to the buoyancy-adjusted weight of the heavy ball. We offer a mechanism which describes some of the observed behaviours: the formation and breakup of vertical repulsion chains.

Type: Article
Title: Simulations of a heavy ball falling through a sheared suspension
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s10665-017-9935-5
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1007/s10665-017-9935-5
Language: English
Additional information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords: Concentrated suspensions, Microstructure, Oscillatory shear Repulsion, Sedimentation, Simulations, Stokesian Dynamics, Suspensions
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Mathematics
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1567937
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