Nonisothermal Couette flow of a non-Newtonian fluid under the action of a pressure gradient

Abstract

Nonisothermal Couette flow has been studied in a number of papers [1–11] for various laws of the temperature dependence of viscosity. In [1] the viscosity of the medium was assumed constant; in [2–5] a hyperbolic law of variation of viscosity with temperature was used; in [6–8] the Reynolds relation was assumed; in [9] the investigation was performed for an arbitrary temperature dependence of viscosity. Flows of media with an exponential temperature dependence of viscosity are characterized by large temperature gradients in the flow. This permits the treatment of the temperature variation in the flow of the fluid as a hydrodynamic thermal explosion [8, 10, 11]. The conditions of the formulation of the problem of the articles mentioned were limited by the possibility of obtaining an analytic solution. In the present article we consider nonisothermal Couette flows of a non-Newtonian fluid under the action of a pressure gradient along the plates. The equations for this case do not have an analytic solution. Methods developed in [12–14] for the qualitative study of differential equations in three-dimensional phase spaces were used in the analysis. The calculations were performed by computer.