Coupling a torque rheometer with an ultrasonic velocity profiler for evaluating multiphase fluids in oscillatory shear flows

We propose a torque rheometer coupled with an ultrasonic velocity profiler (UVP) for evaluating multiphase fluids as bulk rheology in oscillatory shear flows. The rheometer mainly consists of wide-gap coaxial cylinders, where the outer cylinder is sinusoidally oscillated and the inner cylinder is fixed to a torque sensor for measuring the wall shear stress. Based on Cauchy’s equation of motion, the spatiotemporal distribution of the shear stress is obtained from the velocity information and the wall shear stress as a boundary condition. This rheometer was applied to a carboxymethyl cellulose aqueous solution and compared with a standard torque-type rheometer. The results of the evaluated viscoelastic properties agreed well with each other, indicating the validity of the proposed rheometry. To further investigate the applicability of the rheometer to multiphase fluids, suspensions of solid spherical particles with a diameter of 220μm with volume fraction of 0.8–3.4% were measured, which are out of the applicable ranges of the standard rheometer. For volume fractions up to 3% where the UVP measurement is available, the relative viscosity agrees well with a theoretical formula. This indicates the applicability of the method to examine multiphase fluids.