A novel design of an electromagnetically levitated vibrational viscometer for biomedical and clinical applications

Abstract

Accurate determination of the viscosity behavior of fluids is extremely important, especially for biomedical and clinical applications. For example, blood viscosity is used to detect cardiovascular diseases in patients. Like blood, all body fluids and biochemical solvents used in biomedical studies are very limited resources. Therefore, a viscometer that is especially focused for biomedical and clinical applications should have the ability to obtain viscosity results from a reservoir as small as possible, in a range as wide as possible and in a period of time as short as possible. The measurements must be accurate even when the fluid temperatures shift swiftly and the test fluids pass throughout the viscometer continuously. Thus, it would be a huge advantage if a viscometer had the capability to measure simultaneously dynamic viscosity, kinematic viscosity, static viscosity, and density. However, there is no viscometer in the world that can achieve these goals. In this study, a novel electromagnetically levitated vibrational viscometer is designed to solve this problem.