Analysis on Different Types of Viscometers, Design, Materials, and Technology: A Review

Abstract

AbstractViscosity as a sensitive measure of liquids changes is a potential quality-control parameter for simple and rapid assessment of fluid. Measuring viscosity is important for the quality assurance of liquid products, as well as for monitoring the viscosity of clinical fluids as a potential hemodynamic biomarker. However, conventional viscometers and their micro-fluidic counterparts typically rely on bulky and expensive equipment and lack the ability for rapid and field-deployable viscosity analysis. Viscometers are broadly employed in a wide range of sensing and monitoring applications, such as biochemical optimization, biomedical diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, and various adulteration detections. When realizing them in a micro-fluidic environment, the viscometers can potentially be used in an automated and robust point-of-care setting. Even after so much evolution, one of the constant challenges faced in the development of micro-fluidic devices is to choose the best fabrication scheme, particularly, in terms of a simplified process, cost, and time. Here, we present a 3D printed electro-micro-fluidic viscometer (EMV). The EMV measures the reference fluid viscosity, under laminar flow, by automatically evaluating the travel time of the sample fluid vis-à-vis to that of a reference fluid. In this paper, we disuses about different types of viscometers, design, materials, and technology.KeywordsMaterials3D printingTechnologiesViscometer