Experimental Analysis Of Carbopol Gels Inside a Cubical Cavity Across Differentially Heated Plates

—Viscoplastic fluids are the class of fluids with a yield stress that governs their ability to flow. This research deals with the effect of temperature difference applied across a viscoplastic fluid (carbopol gel) and studies the various flow regimes depending on the onset of the flow. Reasonable efforts have been made to estimate the experimental flow onset times and investigate the onset of the flow at different yield stress values. The idea behind the proposed research is to characterize the natural convection of yield stress fluids. The flow field characterization is carried out using a PIV system. The post processing is done using PIVlab, a useful add-on for MATLAB. In this paper, ∆ T refers to the temperature difference across the cavity. We investigated that noflow ∆ T is increased as yield stress increases. We also found that flow development is delayed with an increase in yield stress and decreases with increasing ∆ T for all carbopol concentrations.