A correction method of the wall-slip effect in a cone-plate rheometer

Abstract

The flow of the investigated fluid in a measuring system of a rheometer – a capillary or a slit between rotating parts – may be disturbed by anisotropic behavior of the fluid near the wall. This phenomenon, so-called wall slip, often takes place in concentrated suspensions and solutions of linear polymers and introduces experimental errors to measurement results. There are methods of correction of these errors in the case of capillary and coaxial cylinders measuring systems. In the cone and plate system the correction seems to be more difficult because the width of the gap between cone and plate changes along the radius and thus the influence of the wall slip on the shear stress varies along the radius in an unpredictable and complicated manner. This dependency of the shear stress on the distance from the axis underlies the presented method of correction of experimental results obtained in the cone and plate system. The method requires several series of measurements of shear stress vs. shear rate performed using one measuring set, at various degrees of filling the gap.