2004/11/09 by Morozov, Alexander N., Wim van Saarloos, van Saarloos, Wim +1
Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft #physics.flu-dyn
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0411243
Submitted to Phys.Rev.Lett
arxiv created 2004/11/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Plane Couette flow of visco-elastic fluids is shown to exhibit a purely elastic subcritical instability in spite of being linearly stable. The mechanism of this instability is proposed and the nonlinear stability analysis of plane Couette flow of the Upper-Convected Maxwell fluid is presented. It is found that above the critical Weissenberg number, a small finite-size perturbation is sufficient to create a secondary flow, and the threshold value for the amplitude of the perturbation decreases as the Weissenberg number increases. The results suggest a scenario for weakly turbulent visco-elastic flow which is similar to the one for Newtonian fluids as a function of Reynolds number.