Polymer Processing and Rheology

Polymer Rheology

This chapter concerns the flow behaviour of polymeric liquids. This is a short introduction to the variety of behaviour observed in these complex fluids. It is addressed at the level of a graduate student, who has had exposure to basic fluid mechanics. The contents provide only a broad overview and some simple physical explanations to explain the phenomena. For detailed study and applications t...

The role of extensional rheology in polymer processing

The shear behavior of polymers obtained by means of devices such as capillary and cone-and-plate rheometers is commonly used to assess their processing performance and as a characterization tool. However, the number of instances when two polymers have the same shear properties but perform differently during certain types of processing operations (e.g. film blowing and sheet extrusion) indicate ...

Polymer Gel Rheology and Adhesion

Polymer gels are found in many applications ranging from foods (Ross-Murphy, 1995; Tunick, 2010) and drug delivery (Andrews & Jones, 2006) to adhesives (Creton, 2003) and consumer products (Solomon & Spicer, 2010). By manipulating the gel’s microstructure, a wide variety of physical properties can be achieved ranging from hard rubbery plastics to soft hydrogels. Silicone-based polymer gels in p...

Multiscale modeling of polymer rheology.

We propose a simulation method which can be used to readily parallelize simulations on systems with a large spatial extent. We simulate small parts of the system with independent molecular dynamics simulations, and only occasionally pass information between them through a constitutive model free continuum approach. We illustrate the power of this method in the case of a polymeric fluid undergoi...

Polymer Rheology by Dielectric Spectroscopy