In (general) elastico-viscous liquids the response to stress at any instant will depend on previous rheological history, the equations of state needed to describe the rheological properties of a typical material element at any instant t being expressible in the form of a (properly invariant†) set of integro-differential equations relating its deformation, stress and temperature histories (as defined by a metric tensor (of a convected frame of reference), a stress tensor and the temperature measured in the element as functions of previous time t'( < t)) together with the time lag (t – t') and physical constant tensors associated with the element (1). Thus in any type of oscillatory motion a rheological history will necessarily be a function of the frequency of the forcing agent, the rheological history of a number of different types of elastico-viscous liquids in some simple shearing oscillatory flows being a rather simple oscillatory history (see, for example, (2–4)). It is, therefore, to be expected that a liquid with elastic properties will behave somewhat differently from any inelastic viscous liquid when subjected to any kind of oscillatory motion, and it is for this reason that oscillatory motions have been used extensively to detect and measure the elastic properties of liquids (see, for example, (2–5)).
