Steady-State Flow of a Gelling Material Between Rotating Concentric Cylinders

Abstract

In a previous paper the authors proposed constitutive equations for the analytical description of gelling incompressible materials. This set of equations is used to predict the steady-state Couette-type flow between concentric cylinders under relative rotation. The solution for the thixotropic material is given in terms of five material parameters accounting for the phenomena of “breakdown” and “recovery” in rigidity. Analysis shows that dependence of the solution on the loading history occurs if a certain inequality is satisfied by the five material parameters.