Electrorheological effect of suspensions containing mixed size of poly(ionic liquid) microspheres

In this paper, the electrorheological (ER) effect of suspensions containing mixed size of poly(ionic liquid) (PIL) microspheres were studied by combining experiment and molecular dynamics simulation. The PIL microspheres with two particle sizes were prepared via a cooling-assisted phase separation method. The PIL microspheres were dispersed in silicone oil to form five kinds of suspensions with different volume ratios of large and small at a fixed particle volume fraction. The ER effect of these suspensions was measured by a rheometer. We established ER suspension models for five suspensions and simulated the rheological curves of the ER suspensions using molecular dynamics-stochastic rotation dynamics method. Both experiment and simulation results showed that the ER effect of suspensions containing mixed size of PIL microspheres was lower than that of suspensions containing uniform size of PIL microspheres. The reasons for the influence of mixed particle size on ER effect were analyzed through the three-dimensional visualization simulation results.