Influence of polymer conformation on the entrance length in capillary flow

An analysis of the flow of polymer solutions through capillaries by means of pressure profiles was performed in this work. The experiments were carried out with aqueous solutions of flexible and semirigid macromolecules, Polyox and Xanthan respectively. The influence of the macromolecules' conformation on the flow field development is reflected on the different magnitudes of the entry length, being of the order of 60 diameters for the solutions of rigid macromolecules, and of the order of 10 diameters for flexible ones. In addition, the calculated end effects were larger for the rigid macromolecules than for the flexible ones. From these results, it is found that an increase in the entrance length is observed when the pseudoplastic behavior of the polymer solutions is increased.