A simple semiempirical model for the effective viscosity of multicomponent suspensions

We propose a methodology to approximate the viscosity of multicomponent suspensions. The procedure consists of successive applications of expressions for the viscosity of binary mixtures, originally written as the product of monomodal stiffening functions. First, the viscosity of a binary mixture made of the two smallest components is calculated. This allows to extract a volume fraction that will be used, together with the volume fraction of the third component, to feed the next iteration of the procedure to calculate the viscosity of a trimodal mixture and so on. The application of this approach to arbitrary mixtures requires the detailed knowledge of the geometry of the system in the form of size ratios and compositions. When this information is unknown, an approximation of the model can still be used as a fitting tool. With that purpose, the final expression for the viscosity is written in terms of an effective volume fraction that is further approximated by the use of a (1,2) Padé approximant. This approximation allows to incorporate the crowding effects due to different species in a volume fraction-dependent crowding factor that can be used as a fitting parameter to match experimental or simulation data. We have applied the model to mixtures of particles with different sizes and tested its accuracy comparing with experimental results obtaining very good agreement.