Role of plasticity in the universal scaling of shear-thickening dense suspensions

Increase in viscosity under increasing shear stress, known as shear thickening (ST), is one of the most striking properties of dense particulate suspensions. Under appropriate conditions, they exhibit discontinuous shear thickening (DST), where the viscosity increases dramatically and can also transform into a solid-like state due to shear-induced jamming (SJ). The microscopic mechanism giving rise to such interesting phenomena is still a topic of intense research. A phenomenological model proposed by Wyart and Cates shows that the proliferation of stress-activated interparticle frictional contacts can give rise to such striking flow properties. Building on this model, recent work proposes and verifies a universal scaling relation for ST systems where two different power-law regimes with a well-defined crossover point are obtained. Nonetheless, the difference in the nature of the flow in these two scaling regimes remains unexplored. Here, using rheology in conjugation with high-speed optical imaging, we study the flow and local deformations in various ST systems. We observe that with increasing applied stress, the smooth flow changes into a spatio-temporally varying flow across the scaling crossover. We show that such fluctuating flow is associated with intermittent dilatancy, shear-band plasticity, and fracture induced by system-spanning frictional contacts.