We propose a simple and general model accounting for the dependence of the viscosity of a hard sphere suspension at arbitrary volume fractions. The model constitutes a continuum-medium description based on a recursive-differential method where correlations between the spheres are introduced through an effective volume fraction. In contrast to other differential methods, the introduction of the effective volume fraction as the integration variable implicitly considers interactions between the spheres of the same recursive stage. The final expression for the viscosity scales with this effective volume fraction, which allows constructing a master curve that contains all the experimental situations considered. The agreement of our expression for the viscosity with experiments at low- and high-shear rates and in the high-frequency limit is remarkable for all volume fractions.

We analyze the diffusion of a Brownian particle in a fluid under stationary flow. By using the scheme of nonequilibrium thermodynamics in phase space, we obtain the Fokker-Planck equation that is compared with others derived from the kinetic theory and projector operator techniques. This equation exhibits violation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. By implementing the hydrodynamic regime described by the first moments of the nonequilibrium distribution, we find relaxation equations for the diffusion current and pressure tensor, allowing us to arrive at a complete description of the system in the inertial and diffusion regimes. The simplicity and generality of the method we propose makes it applicable to more complex situations, often encountered in problems of soft-condensed matter, in which not only one but more degrees of freedom are coupled to a nonequilibrium bath.