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Generality of shear thickening in dense suspensions

Nature Materials volume 9, pages 220–224 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

Suspensions are of wide interest and form the basis for many smart fluids1,2,3,4,5,6,7. For most suspensions, the viscosity decreases with increasing shear rate, that is, they shear thin. Few are reported to do the opposite, that is, shear thicken, despite the longstanding expectation that shear thickening is a generic type of suspension behaviour8,9. Here we resolve this apparent contradiction. We demonstrate that shear thickening can be masked by a yield stress and can be recovered when the yield stress is decreased below a threshold. We show the generality of this argument and quantify the threshold in rheology experiments where we control yield stresses arising from a variety of sources, such as attractions from particle surface interactions, induced dipoles from applied electric and magnetic fields, as well as confinement of hard particles at high packing fractions. These findings open up possibilities for the design of smart suspensions that combine shear thickening with electro- or magnetorheological response.

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Figure 1: Revealing shear thickening by adding surfactant to hydrophobic glass spheres in water.
Figure 2: Using magnetic and electric fields to tune the interplay between shear thickening and the yield stress.
Figure 3: Elimination of shear thickening by increasing packing fraction.
Figure 4: Non-equilibrium phase diagrams delineating observable shear-thickening regions in terms of the associated stress range.
Figure 5: Fit of a stress/shear-rate curve broken up into shear-thinning and shear-thickening components.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by DARPA through Army grant W911NF-08-1-0209. E.B. acknowledges further support by the NSF MRSEC programme under DMR-0820054. We thank J. Xu for carrying out the optical tweezer measurements, K. Herlihy and J. Nunes for help with the magnetite-containing particle synthesis, L. Mair and R. Superfine for assistance with optical microscope images in calibrated magnetic fields and J. Sprague and M. Hunter for assistance with manufacturing of PRINT particles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA

    Eric Brown, Carlos S. Orellana & Heinrich M. Jaeger

  2. Liquidia Technologies, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709, USA

    Nicole A. Forman, Benjamin W. Maynor & Joseph M. DeSimone

  3. Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599, USA

    Nicole A. Forman, Hanjun Zhang, Douglas E. Betts & Joseph M. DeSimone

Authors
  1. Eric Brown
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  2. Nicole A. Forman
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  3. Carlos S. Orellana
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  4. Hanjun Zhang
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  5. Benjamin W. Maynor
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  6. Douglas E. Betts
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  7. Joseph M. DeSimone
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  8. Heinrich M. Jaeger
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Contributions

E.B. and H.M.J. conceived of the study and wrote the manuscript. All team members were involved in conception of manufactured particles that show both a magnetorheological and shear-thickening effect. H.Z., N.A.F., D.E.B. and J.M.D. were responsible for design and initial fabrication of these particles. N.A.F., B.W.M. and J.M.D. were responsible for production of gram quantities of these particles. E.B. and C.S.O. were responsible for the rheological measurements. E.B. analysed the data.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eric Brown.

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Competing interests

Joseph DeSimone and Benjamin Maynor have an interest in Liquidia Technologies, which has licensed the PRINT technology

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Brown, E., Forman, N., Orellana, C. et al. Generality of shear thickening in dense suspensions. Nature Mater 9, 220–224 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2627

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