Study on Particle Aggregation in Dielectric Liquid

摘要

This article presents the dynamic simulation of dielectric particles under an electric field. A model including multipolar interactions between particles is used here to calculate an electric field on the particles and then the force from the electric field. The simulation has been performed on the systems of an ER fluid for different volume fractions. The simulation results by the multipole model have been compared to those by the dipole model, which is often used in the existing works. The comparison shows that, for the system of very low volume fraction, the particles bridge the electrodes faster by the multipole model than by the dipole model. For the systems of higher volume fraction, the aggregation of the particles depends greatly on their initial positions. The results also show that, in an ER fluid, the ordering of particle chains in the field direction and the structure of particle lattice may not be as good as that predicted by the dipole model.