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Viscosity is the material property which relates the viscous stresses in a material to the rate of change of a deformation (the strain rate). Although it applies to general flows, it is easy to visualize and define in a simple shearing flow, such as a planar Couette flow.
Figure 1. Bingham Plastic flow as described by Bingham. Figure 1 shows a graph of the behaviour of an ordinary viscous (or Newtonian) fluid in red, for example in a pipe. If the pressure at one end of a pipe is increased this produces a stress on the fluid tending to make it move (called the shear stress) and the volumetric flow rate increases proportionally.
There is also an interesting case where the viscosity decreases as the shear/strain rate remains constant. A material which exhibits this type of behavior is known as thixotropic . In addition, when the stress is independent of this strain rate, the material exhibits plastic deformation. [ 1 ]
The viscosity can easily be calculated from shear stress (from the torque) and shear rate (from the angular velocity). If a test with any geometries runs through a table of several shear rates or stresses, the data can be used to plot a flow curve, that is a graph of viscosity vs shear rate.
For an incompressible and isotropic Newtonian fluid in laminar flow only in the direction x (i.e. where viscosity is isotropic in the fluid), the shear stress is related to the strain rate by the simple constitutive equation = where is the shear stress ("skin drag") in the fluid,
Dimensionless numbers (or characteristic numbers) have an important role in analyzing the behavior of fluids and their flow as well as in other transport phenomena. [1] They include the Reynolds and the Mach numbers, which describe as ratios the relative magnitude of fluid and physical system characteristics, such as density, viscosity, speed of sound, and flow speed.
Volume viscosity (also called bulk viscosity, or second viscosity or, dilatational viscosity) is a material property relevant for characterizing fluid flow. Common symbols are ζ , μ ′ , μ b , κ {\displaystyle \zeta ,\mu ',\mu _{\mathrm {b} },\kappa } or ξ {\displaystyle \xi } .
A flow that is not a function of time is called steady flow. Steady-state flow refers to the condition where the fluid properties at a point in the system do not change over time. Time dependent flow is known as unsteady (also called transient [8]). Whether a particular flow is steady or unsteady, can depend on the chosen frame of reference.