In a context of constant increasing volumes of wastewater treatment sludge, optimizing the treatment of sludge appears to be crucial. Each step of treatment and transportation involves flows. It appears necessary to understand and predict these flows in order, for example, to estimate pressure drops in pipes or to size properly pumping facilities. In a physical point of view, sludge can be considered as a suspension of particles in a gel. Thus, its rheological behaviour presents significant similarities to that of colloidal suspensions of polymeric gels. These three types of materials, i.e. wastewater treatment sludge, colloidal suspensions and polymeric gels, present a complex rheological behaviour which depend on both time and the applied solicitation. They exhibit a dual behaviour, solid at low shear stresses, and liquid when the applied shear stress is high. The solid-liquid behaviour is generally modelled by defining a critical shear stress or a critical strain, supposed to be the limit between the solid and liquid regimes. Nevertheless, this concept implies an abrupt transition, unlike experimental observations showing a continuous and progressive transition. The study of the literature permitted to highlight the need to improve the understanding and modelling of the solid-liquid transition. Moreover, it appears necessary to unify the description of the solid and liquid regime in a unique model, in order to link a mathematical continuity with thecontinuous and progressive nature of the physical phenomenon to model. The study of the results available in the literature permited us to build a unique mathematical model to describe both the solid behaviour and the liquid behaviour of the studied materials. The assumptions made from the literature results have thus been experimentally validated. The proposed model is based on the decomposition of the compliance of the material in the sum of a solid contribution and a liquid contribution, depending on time, the applied solicitation and the story of the material.This model permits a unique description of solide and liquid regimes of the material, taking into account the existence of a residual elasticity at high shear stresses, and a viscous dissipation for low shear stresses, in accordance with experimental results. This work permitted to highlight the fact that the solid-liquid transition mecanism is controlled by the compliance of the material, and not the shear stress or the strain. Moreover, it opened the way to a new way of understanding the thixotropy and the solid-liquid transition of pasty materials. Thus, the behaviour of a pasty material is controlled by two parameters : a plateau elastic modulus corresponding to a totally structured state, and an infinite viscosity corresponding to a totally destructured state. These parameters intrinsic to the material are pondered by the evolutions of the microstructure, leading to a competition between elastic and viscous effects. Thus, the difference between the power law behaviour and the Herschel-Bulkley behaviour can be simply explained by the apparition of elastic effects that can’t be neglected.
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