A continuum-microscopic method based on IRBFs and control volume scheme for viscoelastic fluid flows

A numerical computation of continuum-microscopic model for visco-elastic flows based on the Integrated Radial Basis Function (IRBF) Control Volume and the Stochastic Simulation Techniques (SST) is reported in this paper. The macroscopic flow equations are closed by a stochastic equation for the extra stress at the microscopic level. The former are discretised by a 1D-IRBF-CV method while the latter is integrated with Euler explicit or Predictor-Corrector schemes. Modelling is very efficient as it is based on Cartesian grid, while the integrated RBF approach enhances both the stability of the procedure and the accuracy of the solution. The proposed method is demonstrated with the solution of the start-up Couette flow of the Hookean and FENE dumbbell model fluids

Existence of global weak solutions to kinetic models for dilute polymers

We study the existence of global-in-time weak solutions to a coupled microscopic-macroscopic bead-spring model which arises from the kinetic theory of dilute solutions of polymeric liquids with noninteracting polymer chains. The model consists of the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in a bounded domain in two or three space dimensions, for the velocity and the pressure of the fluid, with an elastic extra-stress tensor as right-hand side in the momentum equation. The extra-stress tensor stems from the random movement of the polymer chains and is defined through the associated probability density function which satisfies a Fokker-Planck type parabolic equation, a crucial feature of which is the presence of a centre-of-mass diffusion term. The anisotropic Friedrichs mollifiers, which naturally arise in the course of the derivation of the model in the Kramers expression for the extra stress tensor and in the drag term in the Fokker-Planck equation, are replaced by isotropic Friedrichs mollifiers. We establish the existence of global-in-time weak solutions to the model for a general class of spring-force-potentials including in particular the widely used FENE (Finitely Extensible Nonlinear Elastic) potential. We justify also, through a rigorous limiting process, certain classical reductions of this model appearing in the literature which exclude the centre-of-mass diffusion term from the Fokker-Planck equation on the grounds that the diffusion coefficient is small relative to other coefficients featuring in the equation. In the case of a corotational drag term we perform a rigorous passage to the limit as the Friedrichs mollifiers in the Kramers expression and the drag term converge to identity operators

Finite element approximation of finitely extensible nonlinear elastic dumbbell models for dilute polymers

We construct a Galerkin finite element method for the numerical approximation of weak solutions to a general class of coupled FENE-type finitely extensible nonlinear elastic dumbbell models that arise from the kinetic theory of dilute solutions of polymeric liquids with noninteracting polymer chains. The class of models involves the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in a bounded domain $\Omega \subset R^d$, d = 2 or 3, for the velocity and the pressure of the fluid, with an elastic extra-stress tensor appearing on the right-hand side in the momentum equation. The extra-stress tensor stems from the random movement of the polymer chains and is defined through the associated probability density function that satisfies a Fokker-Planck type parabolic equation, a crucial feature of which is the presence of a centre-of-mass diffusion term. We require no structural assumptions on the drag term in the Fokker-Planck equation; in particular, the drag term need not be corotational. We perform a rigorous passage to the limit as first the spatial discretization parameter, and then the temporal discretization parameter tend to zero, and show that a (sub)sequence of these finite element approximations converges to a weak solution of this coupled Navier-Stokes-Fokker-Planck system. The passage to the limit is performed under minimal regularity assumptions on the data: a square-integrable and divergence-free initial velocity datum $u_0$ for the Navier-Stokes equation and a nonnegative initial probability density function $\psi_0$ for the Fokker-Planck equation, which has finite relative entropy with respect to the Maxwellian M