Testing the Wyart-Cates model for non-Brownian shear thickening using bidisperse suspensions.

There is a growing consensus that shear thickening of concentrated dispersions is driven by the formation of stress-induced frictional contacts. The Wyart-Cates (WC) model of this phenomenon, in which the microphysics of the contacts enters solely via the fraction f of contacts that are frictional, can successfully fit flow curves for suspensions of weakly polydisperse spheres. However, its validity for "real-life", polydisperse suspensions has yet to be seriously tested.