Don’t Get Stuck: The Physics of Suspension Clogging

From pipes and aquifers to medical devices, flow stoppage is always inconvenient and can be dangerous. When particulate suspensions are driven through confined geometries, they may clog because the suspension is too concentrated, the particles are too large relative to the constriction, or adhesive interactions make particles (or particles and walls) stick. These failures affect many technologies, from printing and irrigation to injection devices and industrial transport.
Clogging is hard to predict because it emerges from coupled physics across scales, from colloidal forces to collective particle rearrangements, and from milliseconds to long operational times. In this talk, I will describe the main mechanisms of suspension clogging (sieving, bridging, and aggregation), and show how they compete depending on confinement, particle properties, and flow conditions. I will then present our recent efforts to quantify clogging statistics, build simple predictive criteria, and identify strategies to mitigate or delay clogging, with the goal of translating mechanism-based understanding into design rules for more clog-resilient suspension flows.