Understanding Rheology PDF

Preface

If you have picked up this book, it is either because you want to understand rheology or because you want to know what rheology is. To respond to the latter possibility, rheology is the study of deformation and flow. To be more precise, it is typically the study of the flow of complex fluids such as polymers, pastes, suspensions, and foods. Simpler fluids, such as water and air, have their own well-defined field, called fluid mechanics.

I am most interested in addressing those of you who have picked up this volume for the first reason—you would like to understand rheology. It would seem that learning about rheology is straightforward since there are many books that address the subject [61, 162, 26, 238]. In my experience with studying rheology, I find that most books assume an understanding of either mathematics or fluid mechanics that is greater than that which I possessed when I entered the field. In teaching the subject, I also have found that most of my students arrive in my class without these prerequisite skills.

Therefore what I set out to create was a workbook/textbook with which engineers, scientists, and others could teach themselves rheology. This book is aimed at the same time at the many technology professionals who end up having to teach themselves this subject on the job, as well as at advanced undergraduates interested in the subject. It is deliberate that this book is more detailed than the average monograph. I hope that this will be the kind of book that students talk about and recommend to their friends as the one book that is totally clear on the subject. As a result of trying to be clear on the mechanics of this subject, this book lacks breadth. I fully admit this flaw and invite accomplished rheologists to skip this book and to proceed immediately to the many fine texts that cover the field of rheology more completely [26, 27, 61, 238, 220, 162, 138]. My goal in this text is to make easier the entry of newcomers into the field of rheology.

This book is an outgrowth of a quarter-long course in introductory rheology I have taught 9 times to undergraduates and first-year graduate students in chemical engineering and mechanical engineering (with a few chemists thrown in) at Michigan Technological University. For 7 years the text for that course was Dynamics of Polymeric Liquids, volume 1, by Bird, Armstrong, and Hassager, Chapters 1–5, 10 [26]. The order of the topics addressed in the current text as well as the approach taken were strongly influenced by that book. For two years I used drafts of Chapters 1–8 in the classroom, and I devised many improvements as a result. I twice taught the material in Chapter 9 in a 10-week graduate course on advanced rheology. In that course the text I used was Constitutive Equations for Polymer Melts and Solutions [138], by Larson, along with supplementary material.