Rheology of Fiber Suspensions

Dear Colleagues,

Materials in the form of fiber suspensions are increasingly used in a wide range of material processing applications, such as composite forming, papermaking, or in the fabrication of nonwoven materials, building materials, health and care products, or in food processing.

Depending on the applications, several types of processing technologies can be used. For instance, in the composite domain, fiber suspensions can be processed using technologies such as injection molding, compression molding, and emerging additive manufacturing technologies. In industrial processes, the concentration regime of fiber suspensions often ranges from a dilute to a very concentrated regime. In addition, fiber suspensions can be subjected to flow conditions with a low to high Reynolds number in confined geometries.

Fiber materials can be synthetic or biosourced and show a large range of characteristic dimensions. Typically, glass, carbon fibers, and natural fibers such as wood or pulp fibers exhibit micrometric diameters, whereas cellulose nanofibrils or carbon nanotubes have nanometric diameters. Depending on the processing and flow conditions, as well as on their slenderness and their mechanical properties, fibers can be deformed and damaged.

The suspending fluids, i.e., water, molten polymers, and uncured resins, cover a wide range of rheological behaviors, from Newtonian to nonlinear viscoelastic fluids, and exhibit various chemical properties.

Hence, fiber–fluid interactions can be of various types: Brownian or hydrodynamic. Fiber–fiber interactions can result from steric effects, mechanical and hydrodynamic interactions or from colloidal interactions.

This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Rheology of Fiber Suspensions” is intended for a wide and interdisciplinary audience and covers recent advances in:

• Advanced experimental techniques for the description of the structure of the fiber network and the fiber structure and their evolutions during the flow of fiber suspensions;
• Innovative modeling approaches for the rheology of fiber suspensions in various concentration regimes and for fiber–fiber or fiber–fluid interactions;
• Advanced numerical approaches for the simulation of the flow of fiber suspensions in various industrial flow situations.

Prof. Dr. Pierre Dumont
Dr. Laurent Orgéas
Dr. Florian Martoïa
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Fiber suspensions
• Flow-induced microstructure
• Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids
• Rigid and deformable fibers
• Characterization methods
• Phenomenological or multiscale modeling
• Discrete or continuous numerical modeling