Revisiting plane Couette–Poiseuille flows of a piezo-viscous fluid

Abstract

We re-examine fully developed isothermal unidirectional plane Couette–Poiseuille flows of an incompressible fluid whose viscosity depends linearly on the pressure as previously considered in [J. Hron, J. Málek, K.R. Rajagopal, Simple flows of fluids with pressure-dependent viscosities, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 457 (2001) 1603–1622]. We show that the conclusion made there that, in contrast to Newtonian and power-law fluids, piezo-viscous fluids allow multiple solutions is not justified, and that the inflection velocity profiles reported in [J. Hron, J. Málek, K.R. Rajagopal, Simple flows of fluids with pressure-dependent viscosities, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. A 457 (2001) 1603–1622] cannot exist. Subsequently, we undertake a systematic parametric study of these flows and identify three distinct families of solutions which can exist in the considered geometry. One of these families has no similar counterpart for fluids with pressure-independent viscosity. We also show that the critical wall speed exists beyond which Poiseuille-type flows are impossible regardless of the magnitude of the applied pressure gradient. For smaller wall speeds channel choking occurs for Poiseuille-type flows at large pressure gradients. These features distinguish drastically piezo-viscous fluids from their Newtonian and power-law counterparts.