Rheology of immiscible blends: Relation with structure in transient shear flows

A systematic overview of the behaviour of immiscible blends under various t ransient flow conditions is presented. On the one hand, it has been observe d that the rheological response reflects very clearly the actual microstruc ture of the blend. It is shown that specific rheological measurements can s erve as techniques to probe in-situ and time-resolved the flow-induced blen d morphology. On the other hand, models that have been developed to describ e the flow behaviour and the corresponding morphology evolution during tran sient shear flow are discussed. The approach that was used to arrive at the se models was to introduce the physics of the morphological processes into the existing blackbox model of Doi-Ohta.