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Shear-thickening suspensions exhibit complex energy dissipation behaviours critical for impact protection applications, yet existing theories consolidate dissipation into a single bulk viscosity without resolving individual microscopic contributions. Here we develop a channel-resolved model that separately quantifies energy dissipation through liquid-liquid viscous, liquid-solid interfacial, and solid-solid frictional channels. Through systematic experiments and simulations, we identify four dissipation regimes dominated by different channel combinations: lubrication-dominated, interface-dominated, synergy-dominated, and friction-dominated. The model resolves total dissipation into individual channel contributions, each characterised by specific event interaction energies and frequencies that evolve independently with shear conditions. This channel-resolved analysis demonstrates that regime transitions originate from the redistribution of energy among the three channels, where the optimal dissipation arises from a cooperative mode combining the solid-solid and liquid-solid channels. The model predicts energy dissipation across the investigated parameter space with mean errors of 4.51% for channel allocation fractions and a maximum error of 12.13% for total energy dissipation, both evaluated against simulation results; provides mechanistic design principles for shear-thickening fluids; and achieves good quantitative agreement with experimental data.
Wang et al. (Thu,) studied this question.