Dynamic simulation of electrorheological suspensions

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Abstract
A simulation method is developed to investigate structure formation in electrorheological suspensions. The suspension is treated as polarizable, spherical particles in a nonconducting medium, with the spheres subject to electric polarization forces due to an applied electric field and to hydrodynamic resistance due to their motion through the continuous phase. The fibrous structures obtained from these simulations are independent of electric field strength and continuous phase viscosity in agreement with experimental observation. We have also found that the details of the simulated structures are sensitive to the treatment of the short-range forces preventing particle overlap. When this force is represented by a form that accurately approximates a hard-sphere interaction, the simulated structures agree well with those obtained experimentally, both with respect to their appearance and the time scale for structure formation.

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