Multiphase Viscoelastic Non-Newtonian Fluid Simulation

Yalan Zhang, Long Shen, Yanrui Xu, and Xiaokun Wang, Chao Yao, Jiri Kosinka, Alexandru Telea, Steffen Frey, Xiaojuan Ban

We propose a method for simulating viscoelastic non-Newtonian fluids within a multiphase framework. For this, we use mixture models to handle component transport and conformation tensor methods to handle the fluid’s viscoelastic stresses. In addition, we consider a bonding effects network to handle the impact of microscopic chemical bonds on phase transport. Our method supports the simulation of both steady-state viscoelastic fluids and discontinuous shear behavior. Compared to previous work on single-phase viscous non-Newtonian fluids, our method can capture more complex behavior, including material mixing processes that generate non-Newtonian fluids. We adopt a uniform set of variables to describe shear thinning, shear thickening, and ordinary Newtonian fluids while automatically calculating local rheology in inhomogeneous solutions. In addition, our method can simulate large viscosity ranges under explicit integration schemes, which typically requires implicit viscosity solvers under earlier single-phase frameworks.

Multiphase Viscoelastic Non-Newtonian Fluid Simulation