On the Generation of Discontinuous Shearing Motions of a Non-Newtonian Fluid

Abstract

The system under study models unsteady, one-dimensional shear flow of a highly elastic and viscous incompressible non-Newtonian fluid with fading memory under isothermal conditions. The flow, in a channel, is driven by a constant pressure gradient, is symmetric about the center line, and satisfies a no-slip boundary condition at the wall. The non-Newtonian contribution to the stress is assumed to obey a differential constitutive law (due to Oldroyd, Johnson & Segalman), the key feature of which is a non-monotone relation between the total steady shear stress and strain rate. In a regime in which the Reynolds number is much smaller than the Deborah (or Weissenberg) number, one obtains a degenerate, singularly perturbed system of nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations. It is shown that if the driving pressure gradient exceeds a critical value (the local shear stress maximum of the steady stress vs. strain rate relation), then the solution to the governing system, starting from rest at , tends as to a particular discontinuous steady state solution (the “top-jumping” steady state), except in a small neighborhood of the discontinuity. This discontinuous steady state is shown to be nonlinearly stable in a precise sense with respect to perturbations yielding smooth initial data. Such discontinuous steady states have been proposed to explain “spurting” flows, which exhibit a large increase in mean flow rate when the driving pressure is raised above a critical value.