# Towards a unified description of the rheology of hard-particle suspensions ﻿

• B. M. Guy (Creator)
• Michiel Hermes (Creator)
• Wilson Poon (Creator)

Dataset

## Abstract

The rheology of suspensions of Brownian, or colloidal, particles (diameter~$d \lesssim 1~\mu$m) differs markedly from that of larger grains ($d \gtrsim 50~\mu$m). Each of these two regimes has been separately studied, but the flow of suspensions with intermediate particle sizes ($1~\mu\textrm{m} \lesssim d \lesssim 50~\mu$m), which occur ubiquitously in applications, remains poorly understood. By measuring the rheology of suspensions of hard spheres with a wide
range of sizes, we show experimentally that shear thickening drives the transition from colloidal to granular flow across the intermediate size regime. This insight makes possible a unified description of the (non-inertial) rheology of hard spheres over the full size spectrum.
Moreover, we are able to test a new theory of friction-induced shear thickening, showing that our data can be well fitted using expressions derived from it.

## Data Citation

Guy, B. M.; Hermes, M.; Poon, W. C. K.. (2015). Towards a unified description of the rheology of hard-particle suspensions, [dataset]. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/ds/286.
Date made available 30 Jul 2015 Edinburgh DataShare