1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Microscopic relationship between colloid-colloid interactions and the rheological behaviour of suspensions: a molecular dynamics-stochastic rotation dynamics investigation" ?
The authors investigate the dependence of the shear viscosity of suspensions of spherical colloids as a function of the volume fraction of the suspension, the colloid-colloid interactions and the shear rate.. The authors couple molecular dynamics to describe the motion of the colloids with stochastic rotation dynamics ( MD-SRD ) for the fluid environment by means of stochastic collisions, in order to incorporate hydrodynamics effects leading to non-newtonian responses.. The impact of the colloid-colloid interactions is examined by modelling the inter-colloid pair potential with a repulsive power law, that allows interpolating different degrees of colloidal softness.. The authors further show evidence for non-newtonian behaviour at high Péclet numbers, characterised both by shear thinning and shear thickening, and thus demonstrate these effects can be successfully captured using MD-SRD methods.
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2. What is the main challenge of colloidal science?
Understanding the relationship between microscopic properties and macroscopic behaviour is one of the main challenges of colloidal science.
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3. What is the intrinsic viscosity of spherical particles?
The intrinsic viscosity for spherical particles is equal to 2.5, larger than 2.5 for other particle shapes, and can be affected by the shear rate due to particle orientation in the flow field, as discussed by Wildemuth and Williams [21].
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4. How is the grid size for the collision step set?
In order to accurately resolve the hydrodynamics down to the characteristic length scale of the colloidal particles, the grid size for the SRD collision step has routinely been set in the literature to 1/4 of the big particle diameter [16].
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