Viscosity Measurement of Alkali Chlorides with Capillary Viscometer

Viscosities of molten alkali chloride have been measured by means of newly designed capillary viscometer made of fused quartz as shown in Fig. 1 and combined with, a special H f transparent electric furnace which can be inverted. The viscometer was of a suspended level type and designed so as to minimize the error associated with the measurement, e.g., the effect of surface tension. Reynolds number of the capillary was less than 100. The sample was introduced in,to the viscometer through the quartz filter and then sealed under vacuum. Cell constants of the viscometer were determined by using distilled water as a calibration liquid. Efflux times were measured by direct visual observation using a digital stopwatch, and showed excellent reproducibility. The viscometer in the present investigation proved to be very precise and the errors accompanied were considered to be less than 0.7%. Viscosities obtained are collected in Table 1 and Figs. 3-l~3-5 together with the previous data. Whereas the viscosity did not necessarily show any regularity, the activation energy for viscous flow increased with increasing cation size in the series of molten alkali chlorides. On the basis of a hard sphere model, the sizes of the flow units were considered to be nearly equal to those of cation-anion pairs. The viscosity of each molten alkali chloride at melting temperature increased with an increasing ratio of the flow unit volume to the hole volume.