On unsteady internal flows of incompressible fluids characterized by implicit constitutive equations in the bulk and on the boundary

Long-time and large-data existence of weak solutions for initial- and boundary-value problems concerning three-dimensional flows of \emph{incompressible} fluids is nowadays available not only for Navier--Stokes fluids but also for various fluid models where the relation between the Cauchy stress tensor and the symmetric part of the velocity gradient is \emph{nonlinear}. The majority of such studies however concerns models where such a dependence is \emph{explicit} (the stress is a function of the velocity gradient), which makes the class of studied models unduly restrictive. The same concerns boundary conditions, or more precisely the slipping mechanisms on the boundary, where the no-slip is still the most preferred condition considered in the literature. Our main objective is to develop a robust mathematical theory for unsteady internal flows of \emph{implicitly constituted} incompressible fluids with implicit relations between the tangential projections of the velocity and the normal traction on the boundary. The theory covers numerous rheological models used in chemistry, biorheology, polymer and food industry as well as in geomechanics. It also includes, as special cases, nonlinear slip as well as stick-slip boundary conditions. Unlike earlier studies, the conditions characterizing admissible classes of constitutive equations are expressed by means of tools of elementary calculus. In addition, a fully constructive proof (approximation scheme) is incorporated. Finally, we focus on the question of uniqueness of such weak solutions

A semismooth Newton method for implicitly constituted non-Newtonian fluids and its application to the numerical approximation of Bingham flow

We propose a semismooth Newton method for non-Newtonian models of incompressible flow where the constitutive relation between the shear stress and the symmetric velocity gradient is given implicitly; this class of constitutive relations captures for instance the models of Bingham and Herschel-Bulkley. The proposed method avoids the use of variational inequalities and is based on a particularly simple regularisation for which the (weak) convergence of the approximate stresses is known to hold. The system is analysed at the function space level and results in mesh-independent behaviour of the nonlinear iterations.Comment: 25 page

Development of boundary layers in Euler fluids that on "activation'' respond like Navier-Stokes fluids

We consider the flow of a fluid whose response characteristics change due the value of the norm of the symmetric part of the velocity gradient, behaving as an Euler fluid below a critical value and as a Navier-Stokes fluid at and above the critical value, the norm being determined by the external stimuli. We show that such a fluid, while flowing past a bluff body, develops boundary layers which are practically identical to those that one encounters within the context of the classical boundary layer theory propounded by Prandtl. Unlike the classical boundary layer theory that arises as an approximation within the context of the Navier-Stokes theory, here the development of boundary layers is due to a change in the response characteristics of the constitutive relation. We study the flow of such a fluid past an airfoil and compare the same against the solution of the Navier-Stokes equations. We find that the results are in excellent agreement with regard to the velocity and vorticity fields for the two cases