Scaling relations between viscosity and diffusivity in shear-thickening suspensions

Abstract

Dense suspensions often exhibit a dramatic response to large external deformation. The recent body of work has related this behavior to transition from an unconstrained lubricated to a constrained frictional state. Here, we use numerical simulations to study the flow behavior and shear-induced diffusion of frictional non-Brownian spheres in two dimensions under simple shear flow. We first show that both viscosity $\eta$ and diffusivity $D/\dot{\gamma}$ of the particles increase at characteristic shear stress, which is associated with lubrication to frictional transition. Subsequently, we propose a one-to-one relation between viscosity and diffusivity using the length scale $\xi$ associated with the size of collective motions (rigid clusters) of the particles. We demonstrate that $\eta$ and $D/\dot{\gamma}$ are controlled by $\xi$ in two distinct flow regimes, i.e. in the frictionless and frictional states, where the one-to-one relation is described as a crossover from $D/\dot{\gamma}\sim\eta$ ({frictionless}) to $\eta^{1/3}$ ({frictional}). We also confirm the proposed power laws are insensitive to the interparticle friction and system size.