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Effective Viscosity Closures for Thixotropic Turbulent Pipe Flow

How turbulent pipe flow of thixotropic fluids, whose viscosity depends on shear-rate history through a structural parameter, reduces to an equivalent time-independent generalized Newtonian flow. The effective viscosity follows from the thixotropic fading-memory kernel evaluated over the Lagrangian shear history, modeled as a stochastic process in radial position, and this correspondence holds from slow through fast thixotropic kinetics.

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Turbulent Pipe Flow of Thixotropic Fluids

Complex materials with internal microstructure such as suspensions and emulsions exhibit time-dependent rheology characterized by viscoelasticity and thixotropy. In many large-scale applications such…