The squeeze strengthening effect on the rheological and microstructured behaviors of magnetorheological fluids: a molecular dynamics study

Abstract

Systematic molecular dynamics simulations are conducted on magnetorheological (MR) fluids under steady state, squeeze flows and shear flows. The present study concerns the squeeze-assisted MR fluid strengthening and correlates the suspensions’ macroscopic rheological properties to their microstructure evolution in terms of the aggregation kinetics. Simulation results demonstrate that the squeeze strengthening effect on the rheological properties of MR fluids is enhanced with the increasing magnetic field and becomes more prominent for dilute suspensions, but weakened with the increasing squeeze rate after the critical squeeze rate is surpassed. By microscopic inspection, it is found that the rheological properties of MR fluids under squeeze flows are consistent with the microstructured behaviors of MR suspensions in terms of the particle distribution, cluster kinetics, particle connectivity and magnetic energy. This study provides a microstructural insight into the squeeze-assisted MR fluid strengthening, which helps to attain an elegant design of MR devices with high shear performance requirements.