2014/09/30 by Daniel Lester, Lester, Daniel R., Richard Buscall +1 · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Chemical Engineering · Materials Science · #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Polysaccharides Composition and Applications #Rheology and Fluid Dynamics Studies #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1409.8397
openalex publication_date 2014/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The batch settling test is widely used to estimate the compressive rheology of strongly flocculated colloidal suspensions, in particular the compressive yield strength and hydraulic permeability. Recently it has been discovered that wall adhesion effects in these tests may be significantly greater than previously appreciated, which can introduce unbounded errors in the estimation of these rheological functions. Whilst a methodology to solve the underlying static problem and correct for wall adhesion effects has been developed, this method is quite complex and unwieldy, involving solution of a 2D hyper-elastic constitutive model for strong colloidal gels. In this paper we develop a highly simplified 1D visco-plastic approximation to the hyper-elastic model which admits analytic expressions for the equilibrium solids concentration profile and bed height. These expressions facilitate robust estimation of the compressive yield and wall adhesion strength via nonlinear regression of experimental data in the presence of small measurement errors.