Linear Viscoelastic Behavior of Bentonite-Water Suspensions

Bentonite are extensively used materials in a wide range of applications. Creep and oscillatory shear experiments in the linear viscoelastic domain were carried out on bentonite-water suspensions at different solid fractions. It was found that bentonite dispersions exhibit important viscoelastic behavior which could be represented by the generalized Kelvin-Voigt mechanical model. It is well known that an exhaustive study of colloidal dispersions may require the determination of its viscoelastic properties over a wide frequency scale. Unfortunately, due to microstructure changes, the experiments are limited in time. In order to avoid such limitation, oscillatory data were deduced from creep curves - without actually vibrating the clay dispersions - because a periodic experiment at frequency ω is qualitatively equivalent to a creep test at time 1/ω. That is, it was possible to complete the dynamic response in the low-frequency range using data obtained from the transient response in creep