Capillary forces between two identical spherical particles

Abstract

The properties of colloidal suspensions and granular matter change drastically upon adding a small amount of liquid capable of forming capillary bridges between the solid particles. The attractive forces exerted by these liquid bridges induce the formation of particle aggregates and networks, which radically changes the macroscopic mechanical and rheological behaviour. Predicting these forces across bridge sizes, particle separations and wettability is therefore central to particle-scale modelling of capillary suspensions and wet granular matter. While the Young-Laplace equation governing the properties of the liquid bridges is well known, it lacks a convenient analytical solution. Current simulations therefore employ approximate analytic expressions, typically developed for contact angles below ~40° and bridge volumes below ~2.5% of the solid particle's volume. We compare several frequently used expressions from the literature with numerical solutions of the theoretical capillary forces. An overall good agreement is observed in the aforementioned parameter ranges, while the approximate expressions start to deviate outside their intended domains. We propose accurate and computationally efficient expressions for the capillary force that model this behaviour, for contact angles from 5° to 80° and bridge volumes from $10^{-6}$ to 0.15. We also explore mesoscopic 'fluid-scale' simulations of bridges by Multi-body Dissipative Particle Dynamics (MDPD), to ascertain whether this coarse-grained fluid model faithfully captures the continuum capillary forces. Remarkably, a good agreement is observed even for liquid bridges described by a mere few dozen fluid particles. Together, these results offer two approaches, at different resolution scales, for simulating bridges over a wide range of bridge volumes and contact angles.