b'Fundamental Liquid/Porous- Understanding the rheological and interfacial properties of high-solids Solid Interactions in High-solidsslurries as a function of their physical and chemical characteristics reduces Slurry Processing manufacturing waste and energy demand.P rocessing high-solids slurries, wet solids slurries containing 50% solids by volume, is a challenge for many industries, such as converting biomass to fuels or products, food processing, electrode manufacturing for batteries, and the formation of photovoltaics and other sensors. These processing challenges often arise from a lack of fundamental understanding of the coupled particle-particle TOTAL APPROVED AMOUNT:mechanical and particle-fluid interfacial interactions that dominate the non-$707,500 over 2 years Newtonian rheology of these systems. Understanding the rheological and interfacial properties of these slurries as a function of the physical and chemical characteristics PROJECT NUMBER:of the system would allow manufacturers to achieve more consistent products with 19A39-185 reduced waste and energy demands.PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: A primary reason for the processing difficulty of wet solids stems from significant Luke Williams variability in the solids fraction of the slurry in terms of surface chemistry, particle CO-INVESTIGATORS: size, size distribution, and morphology, which all play a major role in determining Yidong Xia, INL both solid-solid and solid-liquid interfacial interactions. This project addressed Jiaoyan Li, State Universitythese challenges by characterizing the solids physical properties and free chemicals of New York at Buffalo in the slurry system that affect the solid-liquid interactions. These impactful physical and chemical properties were also manipulated by using treatments during material storage and preprocessing to alter the properties of interest. System characteristics are then correlated to viscosity data measured through capillary rheology experiments that mimicked process relevant conditions. Additionally, the material characterization and processing experiments were used as baseline data to inform the development and validation of a computational model for slurry.Dissipative particle dynamics configurations of high-solids slurries systems: (a) Solid particles without self-structure described explicitly, in which the blue particles represent water droplets (with radius of 20m), pink particles represent biomass grains (with radius of 50 m) with hydrophilic surface properties and green particles represent biomass grains (with radius of 50 m) with hydrophobic surface properties. (b) Solid particles with self-structure described explicitly, in which the blue particles represent water droplets, and green particles of spherical and aspherical shapes.76'