Fluid Rheology
Team Activities
The research team is currently done in two ways: rheology of clay suspensions and the study of flows of thixotropes suspensions. The first axis, with a rather basic character, focuses on the influence of physical and chemical properties of hydrated clay materials and their microstructure on the rheological behaviour of their suspensions in water. The second, more oriented towards fluid mechanics, is to run the description of thixotropes suspensions to critical threshold, in stationary or transitional state.
Many suspensions, industrial or natural, such as sludge, emulsions, foams, paints, ..., can move gradually and reversibly, from a state of elastic gel to more or less liquid state depending on the importance of shear to which they are submitted. This property called thixotropy, is linked to the possibility of changing their microstructure (set of flocculated particles, rows of fibres, molecular associations tangle...) based on mechanical stresses. The rheological behavior of these environments depends on every moment of their structural condition and may change over time. The study of thixotropes suspensions flows is currently a thematic in strong development within the team. It has 2 parts, one of metrology, the other of numerical simulation.
