ABSTRACT
The term rheology seems to generate a slight sense of terror in the average worker in materials. Rheology is defined as the study of the deformation and flow of materials. The term was coined by Bingham to describe the work being done in modeling how materials behave under heat and force. Bingham thought that chemists would be frightened away by the term continuum mechanics,1 which was the name of the branch of physics concerned with these properties. This renaming was one of science’s less successful marketing ploys, as most chemists think rheology is something only done by engineers with degrees in non-Newtonian fluid mechanics and most likely in dark rooms.
