Shear viscosity of suspensions of aligned non-Brownian fibres

We report on the steady-state shear viscosity of suspensions of fibres dispersed in Newtonian fluids, in a wide range of volume fractions throughout the dilute and semi-dilute regimes. We show that the apparent shear-thinning behaviour, which is sometimes observed in the semi-dilute regime at intermediate shear rates, is an experimental artefact due to the presence of transient clusters of entangled fibres in the suspensions. At high shear rates, the fibres are aligned and the suspensions exhibit Newtonian behaviour. In this regime, the viscosity is a function of volume fraction and fibre aspect ratio only. The data can be rescaled onto a universal curve using a variable that accounts for the average contribution of the particles to the bulk stress. All these results are discussed in relation to recent theories. Received: 19 January 1999 Accepted: 17 June 1999