Understanding the behaviour of multiphase flows of solid in viscoelastic fluids is
essential in several industrial applications, such as oil sands mining and polymer processing.
For this aim, a novel numerical algorithm was implemented on an open-source finite-volume
fluid flow solver coupled with an immersed boundary method, to allow the use of viscoelastic
constitutive equations on the fluid (continuous) phase. To avoid numerical issues related to
high Weissenberg number flows the log-conformation tensor approach can be employed on
the newly developed algorithm. The accuracy of the algorithm was evaluated by studying
several benchmark flows, namely: (i) the sedimentation of a sphere in a bounded domain
surrounded by either Newtonian or viscoelastic fluids; (ii) rotation of a sphere in a
homogeneous shear viscoelastic fluid flow; (iii) the cross-stream migration of a neutrally
buoyant sphere in a steady Poiseuille flow, considering both Newtonian and viscoelastic
suspending fluids. All the results obtained, on the referred case studies, allowed either to
replicate the ones available on the published literature, or to describe additional effects
promoted by the assumption of viscoelastic behaviour on the continuous phase. To illustrate
the potential of the developed code, a newly case study of the shear-induced solid particle
alignment in wall-bounded Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids was studied. The role of the
fluid rheology and finite gap size on both the approach rate and pathways of the solid
particles are described.This work is funded by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020
Programme and National Funds through FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and
Technology under the project UID/CTM/50025/2013. The authors would like to acknowledge
the Minho University cluster under the project Search-ON2: Revitalization of HPC
infrastructure of UMinho (NORTE-07-0162-FEDER-000086), co-funded by the North
Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2-0 Novo Norte), under the National
Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
