A Numerical Solution Based on the Fokker-Planck Equation for Dilute Polymer Solutions Using High Order RBF Methods

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical method for the Fokker-Planck Equation (FPE) based on mesoscopic modelling of dilute polymer solutions using Radial Basis Function (RBF) approaches. The stress is determined by the solution of a FPE while the velocity field is locally calculated via the solution of conservation Differential Equations (DEs) [1,2]. The FPE and PDEs are approximated separately by two different Integrated RBF methods. The time implicit discretisation of both FPE and PDEs is carried out using collocation methods where the high order RBF approximants improve significantly the accuracy of the numerical solutions and the convergence rate. As an illustration of the method, the time evolution of a start-up flow is studied for the Finitely Extensible Nonlinear Elastic (FENE) dumbbell model.