FEM simulation of non-isothermal viscoelastic fluids

Abstract

Thermo-mechanically coupled transport processes of viscoelastic fluids are important components in many applications in mechanical and chemical engineering. The aim of this thesis is the development of efficient numerical techniques for incompressible, non-isothermal, viscoelastic fluids which take into account the multiscale behaviour in space and time, the multiphase character and significant geometrical changes. Based on special CFD techniques including adaptivity/local grid alignment in space/time and fast hierarchical FEM techniques, the result shall be a new CFD tool which has to be evaluated w.r.t. well-known benchmarks and experimental results. The advantages of such a method are numerous and lead to efficient and accurate solution with respect to different rheological models and type of nonlinearities. In addition, it gives us a great deal of flexibility not only in dealing with well known difficulties such as High Weissenberg Number Problem (HWNP) but also in treating any new rheological models in the coming future. Several benchmark problems of interest to industrial purposes are also proposed in validating the state of the art of the numerical method.