An interesting article for clotting of human blood, I have found.
I can imagine that clotting (solidification) of blood has significant effects on surgeries and other medical operations. But I did not know how people quantify it. According to the article above, medical people make rheological measurements so-called thrombelastography. Because I did not know the term “thrombelastography”, I made google and found this quite informative website with nice videos.
As mentioned above, the measurement is a kind of dynamic viscoelastic measurement, and conceptually very similar to the Chambon-Winter method for detecting the gelation. Namely, an oscillatory shear deformation is applied to the sample, and the stress is measured. However, the way to evaluate the clotting ability is of huge difference. The main reason of difference is, to me, the necessity for quick evaluation as possible for the case of medical usage. Indeed, the paper mentioned above is for the development of new evaluation method for thrombelastograph to attain further swift evaluation than the conventional one.
For polymer rheology, the methodology has been mostly established, and the fundamentals have to be followed as possible. But for some materials that exhibits time-dependent behaviors and/or strong sample-individualisms, just like blood, something new is of necessity.