A conservative lubrication dynamics method for the simulation of dense non-colloidal suspensions with particle spin

Abstract

In this paper, a novel Fast Lubrication Dynamics method that can efficiently simulate dense non-colloidal suspensions is proposed. To reduce the computational cost in the presented methodology, interparticle lubrication-based forces and torques alone are considered together with a short-range repulsion to enforce finite inter-particle separation due to surface roughness, Brownian forces or other excluded volume effects. Given that the lubrication forces are singular, i.e. scaling inversely with the inter-particle gap, the strategy to expedite the calculations is severely compromised if explicit integration schemes are used, especially at high concentrations. To overcome this issue, an efficient semi-implicit splitting integration scheme to solve for the particles translational and rotational velocities is presented. To validate the proposed methodology, a suspension under simple shear test is simulated in three dimensions and its rheology is compared against benchmark results. To demonstrate the stability/speed-up in the calculations, performance of the proposed semi-implicit scheme is compared against a classical explicit Velocity-Verlet scheme. The predicted viscometric functions for a non-colloidal suspension with a Newtonian matrix are in excellent agreement with the reference data from the literature. Moreover, the presented semi-implicit algorithm is found to be significantly faster than the classical lubrication dynamics methods with Velocity-Verlet integration schemes.