Rheological Behaviour of Energetic Concentrated Suspensions Lynked to Their Components Physico-Chemical Properties

Concentrated suspensions are fluids that exhibit complex non-Newtonian and time-dependent rheological behaviour. The literature offers many structural models that typically take into account the influence of the viscosity of the continuous phase, the volume fraction of the dispersed phase and the geometrical characteristics of suspended particles. Due to their complex formulation, energetic suspensions require also the consideration of many other physicochemical factors. Each of these factors may affect the rheology of the suspension but can also act in synergy or antagonism with the other factors leading to complex couplings. In the present paper, the effect of all physicochemical properties of the solid particles on the suspension viscosity is taken into account. The physicochemical characteristics of both solids and fluids were first determined, which were used to build a design of experiments with the viscosity of the different formulations as the response. Thanks to multilinear regression and analysis of variance of the experimental data, combined with a mechanistic approach, a model was established, correlating the viscosity of the studied suspension to the shear rate and physicochemical properties of the solid phase.