High-Shear Rheology of Shear-Thinning Fluids from Turbulent Pipe Flow Data - Datasets

Résumé fourni par la source

Reliable prediction of turbulent flow of non-Newtonian fluids remains a major challenge in many process industries. One reason is that conventional rheological characterisation methods are limited to moderate shear rates (< ~1,200 s-1), well below those encountered in industrial turbulent transport (> ~3,000 s-1). This gap invites the extrapolation of rheological data, resulting in substantial errors in turbulent flow predictions. In this study, we present a practical method to estimate high-shear rheology directly from turbulent pipe flow measurements. The method, also packaged in a downloadable software application, uses recent correlations for turbulent pipe flow of Herschel–Bulkley (HB) and Sisko models, to fit model parameters to turbulent pipe flow data (velocity vs pressure gradient) alone, or a combination of this data and laminar pipe flow or benchtop rheometry data, if available. Application to wastewater sludges shows that the inclusion of a single turbulent flow data point into the fitting procedure reduces turbulent flow prediction errors from 19% to 6% for the HB model, and from 22% to 5% for the Sisko model. These results demonstrate that accurate high-shear rheology data of shear-thinning fluids can be robustly obtained from turbulent pipe flow measurements without the need for specialised equipment or techniques.

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