Stress boundary layers in the viscoelastic flow past a cylinder in a channel: limiting solutions

Abstract

The flow past a cylinder in a channel with the aspect ratio of 2:1 for the upper convected Maxwell (UCM) fluid and the Oldroyd-B fluid with the viscosity ratio of 0.59 is studied by using the Galerkin/Least-square finite element method and a p-adaptive refinement algorithm. A posteriori error estimation indicates that the stress-gradient error dominates the total error. As the Deborah number, De, approaches 0.8 for the UCM fluid and 0.9 for the Oldroyd-B fluid, strong stress boundary layers near the rear stagnation point are forming, which are characterized by jumps of the stress-profiles on the cylinder wall and plane of symmetry, huge stress gradients and rapid decay of the gradients across narrow thicknesses. The origin of the huge stress-gradients can be traced to the purely elongational flow behind the rear stagnation point, where the position at which the elongation rate is of 1/2De approaches the rear stagnation point as the Deborah number approaches the critical values. These observations imply that the cylinder problem for the UCM and Oldroyd-B fluids may have physical limiting Deborah numbers of 0.8 and 0.9, respectively.