Resistance to uniaxial extensional flow of fibre suspensions

The tensile stress due to resistance to uniaxial extensional flow of fibre suspensions in Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids has been measured using the filament stretching technique. It has been found that addition of fibres to a Newtonian fluid increases the extensional viscosity. The steady state results agree with Bachelor's theory and the stress growth behaviour is qualitatively predicted by the theory of Dinh and Armstrong. Experimental results from this work have also shown that the behaviour of a fibre suspension in viscoelastic fluid is qualitatively described by Fan's equation. The added fibres increase the extensional stress growth coefficient of the viscoelastic fluid at low strain but have marginal effect on the fluid after the onset of strain-hardening.