Abstract
The objective of this study is to well understand the migration and orientation of thin micro-particles, such as talc and mica, in a suspension flow through a slit channel as well as to obtain the knowledge of the sheet processing operations of thin micro-particle reinforced composites by means of both experiments and numerical simulations. The following result was obtained in this study: (1) migration of thin micro disk-like particles did not occur in a slit channel flow, thus the concentration distribution was almost uniform: (2) transparent/translucent strand pattern observed in a suspension flow with thin micro disk-like particles was ascribed to the flow-induced shade region produced by disk-like particles, i.e., this phenomenon arises from frequent flip-over of disk-like particles.
