Applications of Monte Carlo method to nonlinear regression of rheological data

In rheological study, it is often to determine the parameters of rheological models from experimental data. Since both rheological data and values of the parameters vary in logarithmic scale and the number of the parameters is quite large, conventional method of nonlinear regression such as Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) method is usually ineffective. The gradient-based method such as LM is apt to be caught in local minima which give unphysical values of the parameters whenever the initial guess of the parameters is far from the global optimum. Although this problem could be solved by simulated annealing (SA), the Monte Carlo (MC) method needs adjustable parameter which could be determined in ad hoc manner. We suggest a simplified version of SA, a kind of MC methods which results in effective values of the parameters of most complicated rheological models such as the Carreau-Yasuda model of steady shear viscosity, discrete relaxation spectrum and zero-shear viscosity as a function of concentration and molecular weight.