Understanding Viscoelasticity: An Introduction to Rheology

This book presents an introduction to viscoelasticity, in particular, to the theories of dilute polymer solutions and dilute suspensions of rigid particles in viscous and incompressible fluids. These theories are important, not just because they apply to practical problems of industrial interest, but because they form a solid theoretical base upon which mathematical techniques can be built, from which more complex theories can be constructed, to better mimic material behaviour. The emphasis of this book is not on the voluminous current topical research, but on the necessary tools to understand viscoelasticity.

This is a compact book for a first year graduate course in viscoelasticity and modelling of viscoelastic multiphase fluids. The Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) is introduced as a particle-based method, relevant in modelling of complex-structured fluids. All the basic ideas in DPD are reviewed.

The third edition has been updated and expanded with new results in the meso-scale modelling, links between the fluid modelling to its physical parameters and new matlab programs illustrating the modelling. Particle-based modelling techniques for complex-structure fluids are added together with some sample programs. A solution manual to the problems is included.     

Nhan Phan-Thien began his academic career in 1978 with a Lecturership at the University of Newcastle, Australia. In 1991 he was appointed a Personal Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sydney, and was the first Department Chair of BioEngineering at the National University of Singapore, 2000-2004. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 1999, and the ASEAN Academy of Engineering and Technology in 2016. He is currently a Professor and Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore.

He was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian Governor General (2003), for service to Australian society and science in Mechanical Engineering, the Gordon Bell Prize (1997), for Parallel Algorithm in the Price-Performance category, by the Computer Division IEEE, the Australian Society of Rheology (1997), the Edgeworth David Medal (1982) by the Royal Society of New South Wales. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at California Institute of Technology (1982).

His research interests include constitutive and numerical modelling of complex-structure materials (soft viscoelastic solids, biopolymers, suspensions), and particle-based techniques dealing with complex-structure fluids. His publication include 5 books and over 330 archival journal papers. His papers attracted more than 9800 citations, with an h-index of 50.

Nam Mai-Duy is a professor at University of Southern Queensland, Australia. He has worked in the field of Computational Rheology and Mechanics for about 20 years, with a strong research track record in developing novel methods (meshless, radial basis function, particle-based ) and their applications in simulating fluid-structure interactions, complex-structured fluids (particulate fluids, viscoelastic fluids) and multiscale calculations.  He has been awarded several prestigious research grants, including Australian Research council (ARC) – Discovery Projects, ARC – Future Fellowship, ARC-Postdoctoral Fellowship and CSIRO Future Manufacturing Flagship. He has produced over 160 scientific publications including 5 book chapters, 101 journal papers published in highly respected journals: Computer Physics Communications, Journal of Computational Physics, Journal of Rheology, Rheologica Acta, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, etc. His (refereed journal) papers have been cited 1768 times and about 16 times per paper, on average, and his h-index is 21 and i10-index is 46 (Google Scholar, 18/Jan/2017).