Radial distribution function of Lennard-Jones fluids in shear flows from intermediate asymptotics

Abstract

Determining the microstructure of colloidal suspensions under shear flows has been a challenge for theoretical and computational methods due to the singularly-perturbed boundary-layer nature of the problem. Previous approaches have been limited to the case of hard-sphere systems and suffer from various limitations in their applicability. We present a new analytic scheme based on intermediate asymptotics which solves the Smoluchowski diffusion-convection equation including both intermolecular and hydrodynamic interactions. The method is able to recover previous results for the hard-sphere fluid and, for the first time, to predict the radial distribution function (rdf) of attractive fluids such as the Lennard-Jones (LJ) fluid. In particular, a new depletion effect is predicted in the rdf of the LJ fluid under shear. This method can be used for the theoretical modelling and understanding of real fluids subjected to flow, with applications ranging from chemical systems to colloids, rheology, plasmas, and atmospherical science.

References in corpus (2)

• A mode coupling theory for Brownian particles in homogeneous steady shear flow
• A First-Principles Constitutive Equation for Suspension Rheology

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Generalized Langevin equation with shear flow and its fluctuation-dissipation theorems derived from a Caldeira-Leggett Hamiltonian
• Microscopic theory for the pair correlation function of liquidlike colloidal suspensions under shear flow
• Solution to the two-body Smoluchowski equation with shear flow for charge-stabilized colloids at low to moderate Péclet numbers