Migration and alignment of spherical particles in sheared viscoelastic suspensions. A quantitative determination of the flow-induced self-assembly kinetics.

Flow-Induced Self-Assembly (FISA) is the flow-driven formation of ordered structures in complex fluids. In this paper the effect of shear flow on the microstructure formation of dilute sphere suspensions in a viscoelastic fluid has been studied experimentally by optical microscopy techniques. The system is formed by Polymethylmethacrylate beads suspended in 20 wt.