Viscoelastic surfactant phases often contain long, flexible aggregates that behave as reversibly breakable polymers. A model that couples the reptation of the micelles to their reversible breakdown explains many recent experimental observations. Recent progress in theory and experiment is reviewed, with an emphasis on extracting quantitative structural and kinetic data from viscoelastic spectra. A rheological theory of nonlinear response in steady shear is described. The microscopic constitutive equation displays a flow instability, which leads to a plateau in the shear stress under increasing shear rate. This is quantitatively in accord with experiment.
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Michael E. Cates (1993) studied this question.
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