Transient rheological behavior of natural polysaccharide xanthan gum solutions in start-up shear flow fields: An experimental study using a strain-controlled rheometer

The objective of the present study is to experimentally investigate the transient rheological behavior of concentrated xanthan gum solutions in start-up shear flow fields. Using a strain-controlled rheometer, a number of constant shear rates were suddenly imposed to aqueous xanthan gum solutions with different concentrations and the resultant shear stress responses were measured with time. The main findings obtained from this study can be summarized as follows: (1) For all shear rates imposed, however low it may be, the shear stress is rapidly increased with time (stress overshoot) upon inception of steady shear flow before passing through the maximum stress value and then gradually decreased with time (stress decay) until reaching a steady state flow. (2) As the imposed shear rate is increased, a more pronounced stress overshoot takes place and the maximum stress value becomes larger, whereas both times at which the maximum stress is observed and needed to reach a steady state flow are shortened. (3) The maximum shear stress is linearly increased with shear rate in a double logarithmic scale and becomes larger with increasing concentration at equal shear rates. In addition, the time at which the maximum stress occurs exhibits a linear relationship with the inverse of shear rate in a double logarithmic scale for all xanthan gum solutions, regardless of their concentrations. (4) The shear stress is sharply increased with an increase in strain until reaching the maximum stress at small range of deformations. The maximum stress is observed at similar strain values, irrespective of the imposed shear rates lower than 10 1/s. (5) The Bird-Leider model can be successfully used with regard to quantitatively predicting the transient behavior of concentrated xanthan gum solutions. However, this model has a fatal weakness in terms of describing a decrease in shear stress (stress decay).