Recirculating Flows Involving Short Fiber Suspensions: Numerical Difficulties and Efficient Advanced Micro-Macro Solvers

Abstract

Numerical modelling of non-Newtonian flows usually involves the coupling between equations of motion characterized by an elliptic character, and the fluid constitutive equation, which defines an advection problem linked to the fluid history. There are different numerical techniques to treat the hyperbolic advection equations. In non-recirculating flows, Eulerian discretizations can give a convergent solution within a short computing time. However, the existence of steady recirculating flow areas induces additional difficulties. Actually, in these flows neither boundary conditions nor initial conditions are known. In this paper we compares different advanced strategies (some of them recently proposed and extended here for addressing complex flows) when they are applied to the solution of the kinetic theory description of a short fiber suspension fluid flows.