Weakly viscoelastic film on a slippery slope

Abstract

We study the stability of weakly viscoelastic film (Walter's B″) flowing down under gravity along a slippery inclined plane. The focus is to investigate the interaction of the bottom slip with the viscoelastic parameter as well as the influence of the other flow parameters on the stability of the flow. For the slippery substrate, we use the Navier-slip boundary condition at the solid–liquid interface. The dimensionless slip length β is first assumed to be small and its order is considered same as the order of the film aspect ratio ϵ=H/L, where H is the mean film thickness and L is a typical wavelength. To discuss the coupled effect of slip length β and viscoelastic parameter γ, we have used the classical Benney equation model (BEM) as well as the weighted residual method (WRM). For linear stability, the normal mode analysis is carried out to capture the instability threshold. The critical Reynolds numbers (Rec) are obtained for BEM and WRM separately for the system. We found that the first-order WRM is a better choice to capture the instability threshold in comparison with a first-order BEM when β is small. Another noteworthy result we obtain is that, in the absence of β, WRM and BEM yield the same expression for the critical Reynolds number. Further, we have extended the study for moderate values of β, that is, β of order unity and it is found that both BEM and WRM are able to capture the effects of β and γ. We derive the Orr–Sommerfeld (OS) type eigenvalue problem and an asymptotic analysis is performed for small perturbation wavenumbers, which gives an expression for the critical Reynolds number for the instability of very long perturbations. The critical Reynolds number obtained by the OS eigenvalue problem exactly matches with that obtained by BEM. Finally, we validate our analytical predictions by performing a direct numerical simulation of the WRM and good agreement between the results of the linear stability analysis, weighted residual model, and the numerical simulations is found.