HYDRAULICS IN THE TIME OF RHEOLOGY: STUDIES INVOLVING NON-NEWTONIAN FLUIDS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF CHILE.

Nowadays, many of the problems traditionally associated to hydraulic engineering do not deal with pure water (or fluid), they involve solid-liquid mixtures. Presence of solid particles in the mixture changes its rheological behaviour, comporting differently than the carrier fluid. Some results of the research carried out with pseudoplastic fluids will be presented during the talk. It includes the critical shear stress for incipient motion of non-cohesive particles in open channel flows; the motion threshold condition under free surface oscillatory flows; bedforms in pressurized ducts conducting power law fluids; the atypical concentration distribution shown by solid particles when they are transported by a pseudoplastic fluid; solitons; numerical simulation of tailings dam breach; etc. Although the studies have been mostly experimental, they also include numerical and theoretical approaches.