Solving the inverse problem of capillary viscometry by Tikhonov regularisation (Q1818662)

The problem of converting experimental data generated by a capillary viscometer into a viscosity versus shear rate plot is formulated as a linear Volterra integral equation of the first kind. The authors apply a mehod based on Tikhonov regularisation to solve this ill-posed inverse problem. The performance of the method is assessed by implementing it for a set of synthetic data where the noise level can be artificially varied. The method is also tested on a set of real data for a commercial HDPE. In all the cases investigated, the Tikhonov regularisation proved to be a simple and reliable way for dealing with the inverse problem of capillary viscometry.