(623b) Dynamics and Rheology of Suspensions of Particles with Arbitrary Shapes

Suspensions of particles in fluids are common in both nature, such as proteins, bacteria, and viruses in biological media, and in engineering fields, such as production of composite materials, dispersions of pigments in paint, and mixtures 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 interactions that are induced by external fields. 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 accelerated Stokesian dynamics to model and study the dynamics of the rheology of the suspension, and we apply this method to any arbitrarily-shaped particles.