Enskog kinetic theory of rheology for a moderately dense inertial suspension

Abstract: The Enskog kinetic theory for moderately dense inertial suspensions under simple shear flow is considered as a model to analyze the rheological properties of the system. The influence of the background fluid on suspended particles is modeled via a viscous drag force plus a Langevin-like term defined in terms of the background temperature. In a previous paper [Hayakawa et al., Phys. Rev. E 96, 042903 (2017)], Grad's moment method with the aid of a linear shear-rate expansion was employed to obtain a theory which gave good agreement with the results of event-driven Langevin simulations of hard spheres for low densities and/or small shear rates. Nevertheless, the previous approach had a limitation of applicability to the high shear-rate and high density regime. Thus, in the present paper, we extend the previous work and develop Grad's theory including higher order terms in the shear rate. This improves significantly the theoretical predictions, a quantitative agreement between theory and simulation being found in the high-density region (volume fractions smaller than or equal to $0.4$).