Viscoelastic fluids can be difficult to model due to the wide range of different physical behaviors that polymer melts can exhibit. One such feature is the viscous elastic boundary layer. We address the particular problem of a viscoelastic shear-dependent fluid flowing past a corner and investigate how the properties of the boundary layer change for a White-Metzner fluid. The boundary layer equations are derived and the upstream layer is matched with the far-field flow. It was found that if the fluid is sufficiently shear thinning then the viscoelastic boundary layer formulation fails due to the inertial forces becoming dominant. The depth of the boundary layer is controlled by the shear-thinning parameters. These effects are not a feature of other shear-thinning models, such as the Phan-Thien-Tanner model. This study provides insight in the different effects of some commonly used viscoelastic models in corner flows in the upstream boundary layer, the downstream boundary layer is not addressed.

No abstract

No abstract

Spring bead models are commonly used in the constitutive equations for polymer melts. One such model based on kinetic theory—the finitely extensible nonlinear elastic dumbbell model incorporating a Peterlin closure approximation (FENE-P)—has previously been applied to study concentration-dependent anisotropy with the inclusion of a mean-field term to account for intermolecular forces in dilute polymer solutions for background profiles of weak shear and elongation. These investigations involved the solution of the Fokker–Planck equation incorporating a constitutive equation for the second moment. In this paper, we extend this analysis to include the effects of large background shear and elongation beyond the Hookean regime. Further, the constitutive equation is solved for the probability density function which permits the computation of any macroscopic variable, allowing direct comparison of the model predictions with molecular dynamics simulations. It was found that if the concentration effects at equilibrium are taken into account, the FENE-P model gives qualitatively the correct predictions, although the over-shoot in extension in comparison to the infinitely dilute case is significantly underpredicted.

a b s t r a c tIn this paper a cross-slot geometry for which the height of the channel is small compared to the other channel dimensions is considered. The normal components of the viscoelastic stresses are found analytically for a second order fluid up to numerical inversion. The validity of the theoretical analysis was corroborated by comparison with numerical simulations based on a stabilized Galerkin least squares finite element method using an Oldroyd B fluid. Close agreement was found between numerical predictions and analytical results for Weissenberg numbers up to 0.2. An explicit expression is formulated for viscoelastic parameters in terms of the variation and strength of the first normal stress difference around the stagnation point. The analysis is generalized for the case where the inlet channel width is different from the outlet channel width. For such configurations it was found that uniformity of the elongation rate was reduced.