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The vane method and kinetic modeling: shear rheology of nanofibrillated cellulose suspensions

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Abstract

We conduct rheological characterization of nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) suspensions, a highly non-Newtonian complex fluid, at several concentrations. Special care is taken to cope with the prevalent problems of time scale issues, wall depletion and confinement effects. We do this by combining the wide-gap vane geometry, extremely long measurement times, and modeling. We take into account the wide-gap related stress heterogeneity by extending upon mainstream methods and apply a gap correction. Furthermore, we rationalize the experimental data through a simple viscous structural model. With these tools we find that, owing to the small size of the particles subjected to Brownian motion, the NFC suspensions exhibit a critical shear rate, where the flow curve experiences a turning point. This makes the steady state of these suspensions at low shear rates non-unique. To optimize various mixing and pumping applications, such history dependent tendency of NFC suspensions to shear band needs to be taken into account.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Effnet program in the Finnish Forest Cluster Ltd, and EU framework 7 program SUNPAP. Also, the support from the Academy of Finland through the COMP center of excellence and the project number 140268, within the framework of the International Doctoral Programme in Bioproducts Technology (PaPSaT) and Graduate School in Chemical Engineering (GSCE) are acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Physics, School of Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 11100, 00076, Espoo, Finland

    Mikael Mohtaschemi, Antti Puisto & Mikko J. Alava

  2. Department of Biotechnology and Chemical Technology, Aalto University, P.O. Box 16100, 00076, Espoo, Finland

    Anni Sorvari & Jukka Seppälä

  3. UPM, Tekniikantie 2C, 02150, Espoo, Finland

    Markus Nuopponen

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  1. Mikael Mohtaschemi
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  2. Anni Sorvari
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Correspondence to Mikael Mohtaschemi.

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Mohtaschemi, M., Sorvari, A., Puisto, A. et al. The vane method and kinetic modeling: shear rheology of nanofibrillated cellulose suspensions. Cellulose 21, 3913–3925 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-014-0409-x

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