  The authors previously introduced an activation model for the onset of shear
thickening in electrically stabilized colloidal suspensions. It predicts that
shear thickening occurs, when particles arranged along the compression axis in
a sheared suspension do overcome the electrostatic repulsion at a critical
shear stress, and are captured in the primary minimum of the DLVO interaction
potential. A comparison with an experimental investigation on non-aqueous
silica suspensions, carried out by Maranzano and Wagner, is performed. For
particle systems that fall into the applicability range of the theory, a good
coincidence between the experimental data and the model predictions can be
found.
