Shear influence on fibre orientation -: Dilute suspension in the near wall region

The purpose of this experimental work was to study the influence of shear close to a solid boundary on the fibre orientation in suspensions with different fibre aspect ratios and concentrations. We have studied a laminar suspension flow down an inclined plate. The fibre orientation in different wall parallel planes were measured. We applied an index-of-refraction (IR) matching method together with particle tracking techniques to obtain the fibre motion. The fibre orientation was extracted using a two-dimensional wavelet transform. The shear flow resulted in fibres perpendicularly oriented to the streamwise direction (rollers) in the near wall region. These rollers were observed in the experiment to perform a rolling-sliding motion down the inclined plate around a stable perpendicular orientation. As the distance to the wall increased the number of rollers decreased and the fibre orientation was unaffected from its initial streamwise orientation. As the aspect ratio increased the influence of shear on the fibre orientation decreased for all measured wall parallel planes. This was also the case for higher fibre concentrations. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the development of the capacity to control the sheet network structure in papermaking.