Modern rheology has progressed in exciting ways, both in experiment and in theory. Rheological instruments have reached a high level of sophistication and, as a consequence, an abundance of high quality rheological data have become available for a wide variety of material classes. These recent advances raise new questions such as: How can we cope with myriads of rheological data? How can we extract useful information in a reasonably short time? Are the data self-consistent? What are the dominating experimental parameters? Furthermore, the fundamental understanding of rheology has reached a level where the molecular scale information can be related to large scale flow behavior. As an example (shown in the course), effects of molecular architecture (linear dimension, branching level, for instance) on (large-scale) extensional flow will be quantified and visualized on the screen. This gives rise to new questions such as: What molecular phenomena determine the macroscopic flow and to which extent? Do the theoretical predictions really work? Where are the limits of the predictions? These are typical questions about experiment and theory that you will be addressing during the short course.

home