The effect of rolling friction on the rheology and kinematics of shear-thickening dense suspensions
Abstract
Sliding friction lowers the jamming packing fraction of dense suspensions and, when activated by stress, drives non-inertial shear thickening. Additional rolling resistance lowers the jamming packing fraction further and can represent effects of particle roughness or angularity. How it changes particle motion on the approach to jamming remains unclear. Using stress-controlled two-dimensional discrete-element simulations, we compare a sliding-only suspension with systems having either uniform or surface-varying rolling friction. At fixed packing fraction, adding rolling friction changes continuous shear thickening into discontinuous shear thickening. At the same distance from the stress-dependent jamming point, Δϕ=ϕ−ϕm(σ), however, the flow curves nearly collapse, showing that the rheological effect arises largely from the shift in ϕm. Guided by this collapse, we compare particle kinematics in the high-stress thickened state at matched Δϕ, revealing differences hidden by the similar bulk response. Translational velocity correlations extend over several particle diameters, whereas rotational correlations remain local. Rolling friction promotes co-rotation at contact in place of strong counter-rotation and suppresses rotational relative to translational fluctuations. Rotation nevertheless becomes increasingly important near jamming in every case. The suspension with surface-varying rolling friction follows the behavior of a uniform system with μr≈0.3 because the coefficients sampled at contacts lie well below the surface average value, here μr≈0.5. Thus, Δϕ largely organizes the shear-thickening rheology, but not the particle kinematics. These retain a distinct signature of the rolling constraint that must be considered when rolling friction is used to model rough or angular particles.
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BibTeX
@misc{agrawal2026effect,
title = {{The effect of rolling friction on the rheology and kinematics of shear-thickening dense suspensions}},
author = {Naveen Kumar Agrawal and Michel Orsi and Martin Trulsson and Luca Brandt},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.21066},
eprint = {2609.21066},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21066},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The effect of rolling friction on the rheology and kinematics of shear-thickening dense suspensions
AU - Naveen Kumar Agrawal
AU - Michel Orsi
AU - Martin Trulsson
AU - Luca Brandt
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/17
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.21066
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.21066
AB - Sliding friction lowers the jamming packing fraction of dense suspensions and, when activated by stress, drives non-inertial shear thickening. Additional rolling resistance lowers the jamming packing fraction further and can represent effects of particle roughness or angularity. How it changes particle motion on the approach to jamming remains unclear. Using stress-controlled two-dimensional discrete-element simulations, we compare a sliding-only suspension with systems having either uniform or surface-varying rolling friction. At fixed packing fraction, adding rolling friction changes continuous shear thickening into discontinuous shear thickening. At the same distance from the stress-dependent jamming point, Δϕ=ϕ−ϕ_m(σ), however, the flow curves nearly collapse, showing that the rheological effect arises largely from the shift in ϕ_m. Guided by this collapse, we compare particle kinematics in the high-stress thickened state at matched Δϕ, revealing differences hidden by the similar bulk response. Translational velocity correlations extend over several particle diameters, whereas rotational correlations remain local. Rolling friction promotes co-rotation at contact in place of strong counter-rotation and suppresses rotational relative to translational fluctuations. Rotation nevertheless becomes increasingly important near jamming in every case. The suspension with surface-varying rolling friction follows the behavior of a uniform system with μ_r≈0.3 because the coefficients sampled at contacts lie well below the surface average value, here μ_r≈0.5. Thus, Δϕ largely organizes the shear-thickening rheology, but not the particle kinematics. These retain a distinct signature of the rolling constraint that must be considered when rolling friction is used to model rough or angular particles.
ER -