Shear-induced migration of a suspension under quasi-planar confinement

The shear-induced migration of a non-Brownian suspension of spherical particles in a Newtonian fluid is studied experimentally. The suspension is confined in a thin rectangular channel that prevents complete particle overlap and subjected to an oscillatory pressure-driven flow. Despite the significant confinement, the suspension exhibits many of the characteristic features of shear-induced migration in bulk suspensions. Furthermore, as a consequence of the channel geometry and the development and application of a single-camera particle tracking method, three-dimensional particle trajectories are obtained that allow us to directly associate particle contacts with the observed migration.