Slippery flows of a Carbopol gel in a microchannel

Abstract

The microscopic structure of a physical gel such as Carbopol flowing in a confined microchannel is strongly heterogeneous over space. Thus tackling the wall-slip behavior using the classical assumption of the presence of a thin layer of Newtonian solvent of constant width near the channel's walls is unjustified. To address the wall-slip scaling behavior, we propose a novel method of directly relating macroscopic rheological measurements to the measured wall velocity gradients. The scaling behavior we obtain via this method differs substantially from the previously published results.

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