Steady Couette flows of elastoviscoplastic fluids are nonunique

Abstract

The Herschel–Bulkley rheological fluid model includes terms representing viscosity and plasticity. In this classical model, below the yield stress the material is strictly rigid. Complementing this model by including elastic behavior below the yield stress leads to a description of an elastoviscoplastic (EVP) material such as an emulsion or a liquid foam. We include this modification in a completely tensorial description of cylindrical Couette shear flows. Both the EVP model parameters, at the scale of a representative volume element, and the predictions (velocity, strain and stress fields) can be readily compared with experiments. We perform a detailed study of the effect of the main parameters, especially the yield strain. We discuss the role of the curvature of the cylindrical Couette geometry in the appearance of localization; we determine the value of the localization length and provide an approximate analytical expression. We then show that, in this tensorial EVP model of cylindrical Couette shear f...