Lid-driven cavity flow of viscoelastic liquids

The lid-driven cavity flow is a well-known benchmark problem for the validation of new numerical methods and techniques. In experimental and numerical studies with viscoelastic fluids in such lid-driven flows, purely-elastic instabilities have been shown to appear even at very low Reynolds numbers. In this work, a finite-volume viscoelastic code, using the log-conformation formulation, is used to probe the effect of viscoelasticity on the appearance of such instabilities in lid-driven cavities for a wide range of aspect ratios (0.125 ≤ Λ ≤ 4.0) at different Deborah number under creeping-flow conditions. The effect of the viscoelasticity on the steady-state results and on the critical conditions for the onset of the elastic instabilities are described and compared to experimental results.

Poole, R. J.; Sousa, R. G.; Afonso, A.; Pinho, F. T.; Oliveira, P. J.; Morozov, A. N.; Alves, M. A. (2016). Lid-driven cavity flow of viscoelastic liquids, [text]. University of Edinburgh. School of Physics and Astronomy. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/ds/1330.