LAMINAR SETTLING OF GLASS BEADS IN VISCO-PLASTIC LIQUIDS

Abstract

The paper deals with a determination of the terminal settling velocity of coarse particles in quiescent visco-plastic liquids of Herschel-Bulkley type. Experiments on laminar settling of glass beads of different sizes were conducted in transparent Carbopol solutions of various rheological properties in a sedimentation column. The terminal settling velocity of a solitude bead was determined together with the rheological parameters of the Carbopol liquid. An evaluation of the experimental results confirms the existence of the laminar regime for all tests and compares the measured velocities with predictions by Wilson et al. method. Furthermore, an alternative method is proposed for a prediction of the terminal settling velocity in the laminar regime which uses a particle-based determination of the strain rate in the expression for the equivalent viscosity. A comparison with our experimental results shows that the predictions using the proposed method agree well with the experiments and the proposed method is in the laminar settling regime more accurate than the Wilson et al. method.