Thermorheological Characterization of Elastoviscoplastic Carbopol Ultrez 20 Gel

Abstract

The temperature and concentration play an important role on rheological parameters of the gel. In this work, an experimental investigation of thermorheological properties of aqueous gel Carbopol Ultrez 20 for various concentrations and temperatures has been presented. Both controlled stress ramps and controlled stress oscillatory sweeps were performed for obtaining the rheological data to find out the effect of temperature and concentration. The hysteresis or thixotropic seemed to have negligible effect. Yield stress, consistency factor, and power law index were found to vary with temperature as well as concentration. With gel concentration, the elastic effect was found to increase whereas viscous dissipation effect was found to decrease. Further, the change in elastic properties was insignificant with temperature in higher frequency range of oscillatory stress sweeps.