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  • Open Access

Shear jamming transition in alternating shear rotation for frictional and frictionless suspensions

Pappu Acharya*

Martin Trulsson†

  • *Contact author: pappu.acharya@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
  • †Contact author: martin.trulsson@chem.lu.se
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 033013 – Published 6 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dysg-d749

Abstract

Alternating shear rotations in dense suspensions have recently shown the ability to reduce both viscosity and dissipation per strain (at a fixed global shear rate). Here, we study alternating shear rotations, with extensive numerical simulations, at various angles and up to their corresponding jamming points. For increasing shear rotation angles, we find that the jamming point is continuously shifted to higher packing fractions for frictional particles, while it remains constant for frictionless particles. As a consequence, the alternating shear rotation is unable to reduce the dissipation per strain for suspensions composed of frictionless particles. We detail the individual contributions, hydrodynamic or contact, to the shear stress, which are uncharted for this protocol. As the angle of rotation increases, the average contact stress decreases. However, we find that the hydrodynamic stress shows the opposite trend, instead increasing with increasing angle. Hence, hydrodynamic stress will dominate up to much higher packing fractions as the angle of rotation increases. In addition, we report how the microstructure varies and establish a one-to-one mapping between the contact number and its contribution to the total stress for both frictionless and frictional particles.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, 033013– Published 6 July, 2026
  • Received 10 March 2025
  • Accepted 9 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by Bibsam.

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