Flows of Neutrally Buoyant Suspensions in Several Viscometers

Abstract

The theory developed by Jiang et al. (1987) for a flowing suspension of neutrally buoyant spheres in an incompressible Newtonian fluid is further tested for a limiting case of the Couette viscometer, for a limiting case of the cone-plate viscometer, and for the parallel-plate viscometer. Compared with the available data for the Couette viscometer, the average errors are less than 2.6% for y <0.10, 4.2% for y < 0.15, and 5.5% for y < 0.20. The predictions of its limiting case for very dilute suspensions are capable of representing these data with errors less than 4% for y < 0.08. KEYWORDS Suspension Apparent viscosity Effective viscosity Couette viscometerCone-plate viscometer Parallel-plate viscometer.