A general method for obtaining shear stress and normal stress functions from parallel disk rheometry data

The problems of converting the torque and normal force versus rim shear rate data generated by parallel disk rheometers into shear stress and normal stress difference as functions of shear rate are formulated as two independent integral equations of the first kind. Tikhonov regularization is used to obtain approximate solutions of these equations. This way of handling parallel disk rheometer data has the advantage that it is independent of the rheological constitutive equation and noise amplification is kept under control by the user-specified parameter in Tikhonov regularization. If the fluid under test exhibits a yield stress, Tikhonov regularization computation will simultaneously give an estimate of the yield stress. The performance of this method is demonstrated by applying it to a number of data sets taken from the published literature and to laboratory measurements conducted specifically for this investigation.