RHEOLOGY OF CONCENTRATED EMULSIONS OF SPHERICAL DROPLETS

Abstract

We propose a viscosity model accounting for experiments of emulsions of two immiscible liquids at arbitrary volume fractions. The model is based on a recursive-differential method formulated in terms of the appropriate scaling variable which emerges from an analysis of excluded volume effects in the system. This variable, called the effective filling fraction, incorporates the geometrical information of the system which determines the maximum packing and reduces to the bare filling fraction for infinitely diluted emulsions. The agreement of our model for the viscosity with experiments and previous theories is good for all the range of volume fractions and viscosity ratios.