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Updated: Aug 30, 2025

Challenges in Rheological Characterization of Highly Concentrated Suspensions — A Case Study for Screen-printing Silver Pastes
Published on: April 10, 2017
Viscous to Inertial Transition in Dense Granular Suspension
Franco Tapia1,2,3, Mie Ichihara1, Olivier Pouliquen3
1Earthquake Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, 1-1-1, Yayoi, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0032, Japan.
Abstract:
Granular suspensions present a transition from a Newtonian rheology in the Stokes limit to a Bagnoldian rheology when inertia is increased. A custom rheometer that can be run in a pressure- or a volume-imposed mode is used to examine this transition in the dense regime close to jamming. By varying systematically the interstitial fluid, shear rate, and packing fraction in volume-imposed measurements, we show that the transition takes place at a Stokes number of 10 independent of the packing fraction. Using pressure-imposed rheometry, we investigate whether the inertial and viscous regimes can be unified as a function of a single dimensionless number based on stress additivity.
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