TABLE OF CONTENTS Polymeric fluids are the most studied of all complex fluids. Their rich rheological behavior is deservedly the topic of numerous books and is much too vast a subject to be covered in detail here. We must therefore limit ourselves to an overview. The interested reader can obtain more thorough presentations in the following references: a book by Ferry (1980), which concentrates on the linear viscoelasticity of polymeric fluids, a pair of books by Bird et al. (1987a, b), which cover polymer constitutive equations, molecular models, and elementary fluid mechanics, books by Tanner (1985), by Dealy and Wissbrun (1990), and by Baird and Dimitris (1995), which emphasize kinematics and polymer processing flows, a book by Macosko (1994) focusing on measurement methods; and a book by Larson (1988) on polymer constitutive equations. Parts of this present chapter are condensed versions of material from Larson (1988). The static properties of flexible polymer molecules are discussed in Section 2.2.3; their chemistry is described in Flory (1953).
This chapter only deals with flexible, single-component, homopolymers that is, polymers made of identical monomers. Copolymers containing more than one kind of monomer on a single chain are discussed in Chapter 13. The chemical structures of some of the most common flexible homopolymers are given in Fig. 2-7. The behavior of rod-like and semiflexible molecules is described in Chapter 11. Multicomponent polymer blends are discussed in Chapter 9.
Polymeric fluids often show strong...
