Turbulence Locality and Granularlike Fluid Shear Viscosity in Collisional Suspensions

We reanalyze previous experimental measurements of solid volume fraction, mean velocity, and velocity fluctuations in collisional suspensions of plastic cylinders and water flowing over inclined, erodible beds. We show that the particle pressure scales with the granular temperature, as predicted by kinetic theory of granular gases. The assumption that the particle shear stress is also well predicted by kinetic theory permits us to determine the fluid shear stress and the effective fluid viscosity from the experiments. The fluid viscosity can be decomposed into turbulent and granularlike components: the turbulent viscosity can be modeled using a mixing length, which is a decreasing function of the local volume fraction and does not depend upon the distance from the bed; the granularlike viscosity, associated with the transfer of momentum due to the conjugate motion of the fluid mass added to the particles, can be modeled by replacing the particle density with the density of the added fluid mass in the viscosity of kinetic theory.