Reader Questions

Reader Question: What is Viscosity?

Reader thesnazz asks:

Is there a difference between surface tension and viscosity, or are they two manifestations of the same process and/or principles? If you know a given fluid’s surface tension, can you predict its viscosity, and vice versa?

This is a good question! To answer it, let’s think about where surface tension and viscosity come from. Like many concepts in fluid dynamics, these quantities describe for a whole fluid the properties that arise from interactions between molecules.

To prevent this becoming overly long, I’m going to tackle this over a couple posts. Today, I’ll talk about viscosity.

One way to describe a fluid’s viscosity is as a measure of its resistance to deformation. Another way to think of it is how easily momentum is transmitted from one part of the fluid to another. The diagram above is the classic representation. A layer of fluid is sandwiched between two flat plates. If the top plate moves, friction requires that the fluid particles in contact with the plate get dragged along. This shears the fluid just below that and drags it along, but not quite as much. Those fluid particles do the same to their neighbors and so on down to the stationary second plate, where the fluid is at rest.

Viscosity is the property that determines how much those neighboring fluid particles move; the more viscous the fluid, the more the neighboring bits of fluid resist getting pulled along. This is a property that’s inherent to a fluid. It comes from how the molecules of the fluid interact with one another, but there are no simple expressions to calculate the viscosity of a liquid or a gas from the individual interactions of its molecules. Instead we experimentally measure viscosity values and use empirical formulas to approximate how viscosity changes with temperature and other effects. (Image credit: Wikimedia)

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