Rheology of Temperature Sensitive Polymer Dispersions

The rheology of concentrated polymer dispersions has been the subject of a number of studies. Recent contributions by Phan et al (1996) and Meeker et al. (1997) showed that the rheology of hard sphere suspensions is rather well understood by now. In many studies on systems with a more complicated interaction potential it is tried to describe the behavior within the frame work of an effective hard sphere. In sterically stabilized latices, the modification of the viscosity by an adsorbed polymer layer can be modeled in terms of an appropriate increase Δ of the radius α of the particle. Hence an effective volume fraction фeff may be defined through $$\varphi _{eff} = \varphi _c \left( {1 + \frac{\Delta } {a}} \right)^3$$ (1) where фc and a denote volume fraction and radius of the uncovered latex particles.