Rheological properties of two high polymers suspended in an abrasive slurry jet

Abstract

Abstract With high polymer added into suspension, the use of abrasive slurry jet (ASJ) has significant advantages in energy management. The quality and efficiency of ASJ are affected distinctly by its structure and the flow field feature, both of which depend on the rheological properties of the abrasive slurry. Therefore, this paper carries out a series of experiments to study the rheological properties of abrasive slurry with polyacrylamide (PAM) and carboxy methyl cellulose (CMC) commonly used in ASJ. The paper also explores the effect of temperature and abrasive on the apparent viscosity of the abrasive slurry. Experimental results show that PAM and CMC solutions behave as a pseudoplastic non-Newtonian fluid in the selected concentration range, whose apparent viscosity increases with the concentration. In addition, specific non-Newtonian fluid constitutive equations of the power-law model for PAM and CMC solution were obtained by nonlinear fitting calculation. The apparent viscosity decreases with the growth of temperature because it leads to the increase in spacing between molecules, making the attraction between molecules smaller and smaller. However, the abrasive has no influence on the apparent viscosity of abrasive slurry for these molecular bonds, and their mechanical entanglements are not destroyed by abrasive particles in the suspension.