Subcritical finite-amplitude solutions in plane Couette flow of visco-elastic fluids
Soft Condensed Matter
2007-05-23 v1 Materials Science
Fluid Dynamics
Abstract
Plane Couette flow of visco-elastic fluids is shown to exhibit a purely elastic subcritical instability in spite of being linearly stable. The mechanism of this instability is proposed and the nonlinear stability analysis of plane Couette flow of the Upper-Convected Maxwell fluid is presented. It is found that above the critical Weissenberg number, a small finite-size perturbation is sufficient to create a secondary flow, and the threshold value for the amplitude of the perturbation decreases as the Weissenberg number increases. The results suggest a scenario for weakly turbulent visco-elastic flow which is similar to the one for Newtonian fluids as a function of Reynolds number.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0411243,
title = {Subcritical finite-amplitude solutions in plane Couette flow of visco-elastic fluids},
author = {Alexander N. Morozov and Wim van Saarloos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0411243},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Submitted to Phys.Rev.Lett