Rheology of plasticized polymer solutions

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...

Rheology of Surfactant Solutions

Several surfactant molecules self-assemble in solution to form long, flexible wormlike micelles which get entangled with each other, leading to viscoelastic gel phases. We discuss our recent work on the rheology of such a gel formed in the dilute aqueous solutions of a surfactant CTAT. In the linear rheology regime, the storage modulus G(ω) and loss modulus G(ω) have been measured over a wide f...

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

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...