An experimental approach to investigate the viscoelastic and rheological behavior of polydisperse glass suspensions

Abstract

Polydispersity is an essential factor in characterizing suspensions, specifically in industrial processes. In the present work, we report the viscosity of non-colloidal polydisperse glass suspensions for the first time and study the predictability of log-transformed quadratic viscosity equations over a wide range of blending ratios at a constant total volume fraction of solid particles. The viscosity and viscoelasticity measurement of multimodal suspensions was carried out by mixing three monomodally distributed solid particle suspensions with a relatively narrow size distribution to prepare bidisperse and tridisperse suspensions. The results showed a good agreement between experimental and predicted viscosity data for multimodal suspensions, making the generalized model a good alternative to describe the viscosity of polydisperse mixtures. The diameter ratio of large-to-small particles and the volume fraction of small particles in bidisperse systems strongly affected the viscoelastic behavior of multimodal suspensions. In addition, the dynamic rheology measurement showed that the storage modulus was independent of frequency, while a linear frequency dependence of loss modulus was observed for multimodal suspensions. In the case of polydisperse suspensions, this yield stress and dimensionless elastic modulus increased by declining the particle size ratio and increasing the volume fraction of small particles in bidisperse subsystems.