(268d) Dynamics and Rheology of Suspensions of Particles with Arbitrary Shapes

Suspensions of particles in a fluid medium are very common in nature, such as proteins, bacteria, and viruses in biological media, and in engineering fields, such as manufacture of composite materials, dispersion of pigments in paint, and mixture of emulsion polymers. While the non-equilibrium properties of suspensions of spherical particles have been widely studied, suspensions of aspherical particles create new questions and phenomena that still need to be explained. The non-equilibrium properties require an accurate knowledge of the interactions among particles, i.e., hydrodynamic interaction and/or other external forces. The hydrodynamic interactions depend on the configuration of the suspension, which makes itself formidable to calculate for an aspherical suspension caused by the complex geometry. In this study, we decomposed the aspherical particles into constitutive spheres and constrained them in rigid-body assemblies. We use the Stokesian Dynamics to model and study the dynamics of the rheology of the suspension and apply this method to any arbitrarily-shaped particles.