Modeling, Mathematical and Numerical Analysis of Electrorheological Fluids

Abstract

Many electrorheological fluids are suspensions consisting of solid particles and a carrier oil. If such a suspension is exposed to a strong electric field the effective viscosity increases dramatically. In this paper we first derive a model which captures this behaviour. For the resulting system of equations we then prove local in time existence of strong solutions for large data. For these solutions we finally derive error estimates for a fully implicit time-discretization.