Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-2dmjx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-10T21:22:25.579Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Well-posedness and ill-posedness of single-phase models for suspensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2023

T. Barker*
Affiliation:
School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Senghennydd Road, Cardiff CF24 4AG, UK
J.M.N.T. Gray*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
D.G. Schaeffer
Affiliation:
Mathematics Department, Duke University, Box 90320, Durham, NC 27708-0320, USA
M. Shearer
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8205, USA
*
†Email addresses for correspondence: nico.gray@manchester.ac.uk, BarkerT1@cardiff.ac.uk
†Email addresses for correspondence: nico.gray@manchester.ac.uk, BarkerT1@cardiff.ac.uk

Abstract

Classical theories for suspensions have been formulated by starting from the Navier–Stokes equations describing pure liquid flow and then introducing additional dependencies to account for the presence of suspended particles. These models are often accurate for low particle concentrations but have lacked a convincing description of the frictional interactions of particles, which are important at larger solid volume fractions. The $\mu (J), \varPhi (J)$ rheology, which draws a direct analogy between suspension flow and dry granular flow, is a recent theory that addresses this issue, but is shown here to be dynamically ill-posed for large solid volume fractions. An alternative well-posed theory is introduced that includes additional dependence on the particle-phase dilation and compression. The new theory, denoted vCIDR, is tested numerically to show grid convergence for problems in which the $\mu (J), \varPhi (J)$ rheology instead suffers from catastrophic blow-up. A further well-posed extension provides a framework for handling the transition between viscous and inertial flows.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1. Model parameters from Boyer et al. (2011) that characterise steady uniform flow in their three-dimensional experiments.

Figure 1

Figure 1. The ill-posed white region and well-posed grey region for the $\mu (J), \varPhi (J)$ rheology of Boyer et al. (2011). Vertical black lines are the neutral stability point at $J=J_{crit}\approx 0.0417$, and the curves are the relations (2.10) and (2.15) with parameters given in table 1.

Figure 2

Figure 2. White regions containing ill-posed perturbation directions, and grey regions with decaying modes for the $\mu (J), \varPhi (J)$ rheology, separated by black neutral curves. (a) System (3.14), chosen for algebraic ease. (b) Here, $ {\boldsymbol{A}}=[0,1;1,0]$, which describes planar shearing. We choose $\mu =\mu _1$ for illustrative purposes.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Snapshots of the flow fields as functions of the vertical coordinate $\tilde {z}$ at progressive times in simulations with the same initial perturbation (4.8) ($\epsilon =0.01$, $k=40{\rm \pi}$), grid resolution $N_\lambda =25$, and non-dimensional fluid viscosity $\tilde {\eta }_f =3.1$. Panels (a,b) are for the well-posed case $\phi _0=0.35$, and (c,d) are for an ill-posed initial packing fraction $\phi _0=0.55$. Note that the output times are different for each case as the ill-posed simulation fails at $\tilde t\approx 1.08\times 10^{-6}$. Panels (b) and (d) are of the same vertical velocity fields as in (a) and (c), respectively, but zoomed into the centre of the domain in a range spanning one wavelength of the initial perturbation. Animations of these computations can be found in supplementary movies 1 and 2, available at https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2022.1004, and plots of the full transient evolution are given in figure 4.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Comparison of the temporal behaviour of the maximum amplitude of $\tilde w$ at different spatial resolutions with the $\mu (J),\varPhi (J)$ rheology. The cases with $N_\lambda =25$ are those from figure 3. All cases have the same initial perturbation (4.8) with $\epsilon =0.01$ and $k=40{\rm \pi}$. Panel (a) is for $\phi _0=0.35$, which lies in the well-posed range, whereas (b) has $\phi _0=0.55$, which gives ill-posed equations.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Temporal behaviour of the maximum amplitude of $\tilde w$ for the vCIDR model given $\alpha =0.5$ and ${\tilde {\eta }_f =3.1}$. The initial conditions are identical to those in figures 3 and 4: (a) $\phi _0=0.35$, and (b) $\phi _0=0.55$. Here, two high-resolution cases are shown, with solid curves corresponding to $N_z=500$, and open circles to $N_z=1000$. Also reproduced, as dashed lines, are the equivalent high-resolution cases using the $\mu (J),\varPhi (J)$ rheology from figure 4.

Figure 6

Figure 6. Evolution of the straddling initial data (6.3) with amplitude $A=0.05$ for the vCIDR model with $\alpha =0.5$ and $\tilde {\eta }_f =3.1$. Panel (a) shows the flow fields plotted at different times, and (b) is the evolution of the minimum and maximum values of $\phi (\tilde z,\tilde t)$ in the domain. Solid lines are with $N_z=401$, and open circles are for $N_z=47$.

Figure 7

Figure 7. A space–time comparison, on a semi-logarithmic axis, of the solid volume fraction evolution from the straddling initial condition (6.3) with $A=0.05$ for (a) the vCIDR model, and (b) the $\mu (J),\varPhi (J)$ rheology. Inset in (b) is the final solid volume fraction profile in the $\mu (J),\varPhi (J)$ rheology simulation before the failure of numerical convergence; the dashed curve in that plot is the initial $\phi$ profile. The vCIDR simulation uses $N_z=401$ spatial points, whereas the $\mu (J),\varPhi (J)$ rheology is performed with $N_z=201$. Animations of these cases can be found in supplementary movies 5 and 6.

Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 1

See "Barker et al. Supplementary Movie Captions"

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 1(Video)
Video 117 KB

Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 2

See "Barker et al. Supplementary Movie Captions"

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 2(Video)
Video 100.6 KB

Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 3

See "Barker et al. Supplementary Movie Captions"

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 3(Video)
Video 142 KB

Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 4

See "Barker et al. Supplementary Movie Captions"

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 4(Video)
Video 140.2 KB

Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 5

See "Barker et al. Supplementary Movie Captions"

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 5(Video)
Video 129 KB

Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 6

See "Barker et al. Supplementary Movie Captions"

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Movie 6(Video)
Video 147.4 KB
Supplementary material: PDF

Barker et al. Supplementary Captions

Barker et al. Supplementary Captions

Download Barker et al. Supplementary Captions(PDF)
PDF 13.4 KB