Link of the Moment: Beer Review

A few years ago, I found a San Diego-based microbrew called Old Viscosity Ale.  Inspired by the post, fellow blogger John Spevacek tracked down some of the product and rigorously tested its tagline "Not your dad's 30 weight."  He published the results in the most recent Rheology Bulletin on page 7.  [Disclosure: I'm acknowledged in the paper.]  Congratulations to John on his humorous work, and thanks to Editor Faith Morrison for including the work in the Bulletin.
One side benefit of John's sampling work is that he supplied a bottle for my own consumption.  I am no longer an unpaid blogger.  I have been compensated in beer.

Quotation of the Moment: Dr. Jones Lectures

"Quicksand is a mixture of sand, mud, and water, and depending on the viscosity, it's not as dangerous as people sometimes think."
--Dr. Henry Jones Jr., in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

(Video can be seen here, in a Slate presentation on quicksand.)

Quotation of the Moment: Rock'n'Roll Fantasy

"He thought it was very funny to talk about his drummer complaining that the caviar in their dressing room was the wrong viscosity - for throwing."

Pete Townshend, in the liner notes for the album White City: A Novel

Viscosity & Fractals

While doing a little light reading [1], I came across this 1920 poem by Lewis Richardson--

Big whorls have little whorls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whorls have lesser whorls,
And so on to viscosity.

Several people [1,2] have remarked on this poem's debt to Jonathan Swift's famous flea poem

So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em
And so proceed ad infinitum.

[1]  Introducing Fractals: a Graphic Guide by Lesmoir-Gordon, Rood, and Edney (2009).
[2]  Wondering Minstrels, a poem-a-day blog that ran from 1999-2007.

Quotation of the Moment: Romy & Michele

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Post-It note, I present this quotation.

"No. Um, well, ordinarily when you make glue first you need to thermoset your resin and then after it cools you have to mix in an epoxide, which is really just a fancy-schmancy name for any simple oxygenated adhesive, right? And then I thought maybe, just maybe, you could raise the viscosity by adding a complex glucose derivative during the emulsification process and it turns out I was right."

From Romy and Michele's High School Reunion

According to IMDb, this is one of five movies that uses the word viscosity in the screenplay.  The book ReAction!: Chemistry in the Movies by Griep and Mikasen says this movie covers the chemistry of sticky notes.

Product of the Moment: Old Viscosity Beer

Featured today is Old Viscosity Ale, brewed by the Port Brewing Company in San Diego, CA.  Their web site states "Code named by our brewers-'The Big Black Nasty,' this is monstrous dark ale is brewed to no particular style. Thick and sludgy like oil from the crankcase of a wheat threshing combine, Old Viscosity blurs the boundaries of Porter, Stout, Old Ale and Barleywines."  


Sadly, this beer is not available in Nebraska, so I won't be able to verify the viscosity myself.  (My interests are purely scientific, of course.)  The beer is available in CA, AZ, WA, and CO, and in the metro areas of Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Quotation of the Moment: Brain Donors

This quotation comes courtesy of a search on IMDb.com for the word "viscosity."


"No?" Flakfizer doesn't know the MEANING of the word "No!" We're also a little fuzzy on "panaglutin" and "viscosity."


The word "panaglutin" does not appear on dictionary.com, and Google suggests the word "panagluttinin" instead.

Viscosity Dot ???

Viscosity.com takes you to Norcross, a manufacturer of shell cups and viscosity control equipment.  Other extensions, like edu or org, are not in use.

Painting the Lab

One possible worry during rotational tests is that the sample can be expelled from a cone or parallel plate fixture at high shear rates.  This occurs when the centrifugal force exceeds the surface tension.

My most memorable experience occurred in my sales days.  I was installing a special system with a 6" (152.4 mm) fixture.  To test it out, I bought a bottle of corn syrup, because I wanted to use something more viscous than water.  There was not enough syrup for the fixture, so I added water to the fixture.  It turns out that water mixes slowly with the corn syrup that's available in American supermarkets.

I started the fixture using controlled stress mode, which was my first mistake.  As the water and corn syrup mixed together, the viscosity started to drop.  As the viscosity dropped, the fixture started to speed up and began fling the sample around the lab.  I shut down the system before all the sample made it to the laboratory walls.

A former colleague of mine referred to this phenomenon as "earning your stripe."

Updated 4/26: (Hey, I have an idea for a new t-shirt!)

High Viscosity

Colleen Putnam, in a December post originally found on Lifestyle and then cross-posted at Zimbio's rheology blog followed up on a money-saving discussion started at Consumer Reports.  The first CR article discussed how much of a commercial product could be left in a container.  The second article described how to pull the remaining product out of the container.
Colleen identified a rheological theme among the commercial products--

The science of rheology, the study of flow, explains how thick, gooey things move differently than smooth watery things. It's a physicist thing. For the non-Newton layperson, it explains why the toothpaste tube, lotion dispenser, and ketchup bottle always have product left at the end that never seems to want to come out. 

As I thought about this comment, something started to bug me.  The main issues with the products (skin lotion, laundry detergent, condiments, and toothpaste) is not how they flow, but how they don't appear to flow.  Simply put, the viscosity of these materials is high.  That is why these materials stay in their respective containers.  Any non-Newtonian flow properties (pseudoplasticity, thixotropy) aren't as important as the viscosity at low shear rates.  For more evidence of this, just see to remove the product from the containers: dilution.  Add the appropriate solvent, reduce the viscosity, and you're on your way to saving money.