| Affiliations: | STEM Research Leadership |
| Project Leader: | Sreejith Pillai
sreejith@tamu.edu Mechanical Engineering |
| Faculty Mentor: | Chandler Benjamin, Ph.D |
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Meeting Times:
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TBA |
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Team Size:
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3 |
| Open Spots: | 2 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Gain basic understanding of experimental rheology and modeling, Possibility of presenting at a conference.
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Team Needs:
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Motivation to do experiments |
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Description:
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The “resistance to flow” of certain fluids like ketchup (colloidal solutions) reduces drastically as the rate of deformation increases. This character of the fluid is called shear thinning behavior. Such fluids exhibit a nonlinear behavior within a range of shear rates and are called non-Newtonian fluids. Our aim is to characterize the flow of such fluids under a parallel plate rheometer. We want to capture the behavior of these fluids under constant stress and under constant shear rates. Such a characterization is important to understand the flow of these fluids in an industrial setup, where fluid transportation through a pipe is very common. An example is the pumping of polymer melts into a mold during injection molding or the fabrication of a bottle using blow molding. |