Bimodal model, suspension viscosity

It should be noted that Farris (1968) developed a bimodal model for polydisperse suspensions in which the fine and the coarse fractions were also assumed to behave independently of each other. However, the arguments were purely geometric and the issues related to the non-Newtonian character of the viscosity were not treated. 

The bimodal model has also been applied to polydisperse suspensions (Probstein et al. 1994), which in practice generally have particle sizes ranging from the submicrometer to hundreds of micrometers. In order to apply the bimodal model to a suspension with a continuous size distribution, a rational procedure is required for the separation of the distribution into fine and coarse fractions. Such a procedure has not been developed so that an inverse method had to be used wherein the separating size was selected which resulted in the best agreement with the measured viscosity. Again, however, the relatively small fraction of colloidal size particles was identified as the principal agent that acts independently of the rest of the system and characterizes the shear thinning nature of the suspension viscosity. 

PROBSTEIN, R.F., SENGUN, M.Z. c TSENG, T-C. 1994. Bimodal model of concentrated suspension viscosity for distributed particle sizes. J. Rheol. 38, No. 4 (1994). 

Two models are available for interpreting attenuation spectra as a PSD in suspensions with chemically distinct, dispersed phases using the extended coupled phase theory.68 Both models assume that the attenuation spectrum of a mixture is composed of a superposition of component spectra. In the multiphase model, the PSD is represented as the sum of two log-normal distributions with the same standard deviation, that is, a bimodal distribution. The appearance of multiple solutions is avoided by setting a common standard deviation to the mean size of each distribution. This may be a poor assumption for the PSD (see section 11.3.2). The effective medium model assumes that only one target phase of a multidisperse system needs to be determined, while all other phases contribute to a homogeneous system, the so-called effective medium. Although not complicated by the possibility of multiple solutions, this model requires additional measurements to determine the density, viscosity, and acoustic attenuation of the effective medium. The attenuation spectrum of the effective medium is modeled via a polynomial fit, while the target phase is assumed to have a log-normal PSD.68 This model allows the PSD for mixtures of more than two phases to be determined. 

Liquid droplets cannot be treated the same as solid particles in their codispersed systems. This behavior has been indicated by equation 66 or 68, in which the Einstein constant increases with increasing viscosity ratio of the dispersed phase to the continuous phase. As is shown by Yan et al. (195, 197, 198), liquid droplet and solid particle effects are additive only when the solid concentration is low, say s < 0.05, and when both solid particles and liquid droplets have comparable sizes. However, when the particle-to-droplet size ratio is large, the particles and the droplets become additive (192) for a wider solid concentration range (Figures 34 and 35). The apparent viscosity of the system may be added in terms of the two distinct model systems pure emulsion characterized by solid-free dispersed phase volume fraction and pure suspension characterized by the volume fraction of the solids. The additive rule for the ternary systems is similar to the rule for bimodal solid particle suspensions due to Farris (139) ... 

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