Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, 2005., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-111)., One of the biggest challenges in non-Newtonian fluid mechanics is calculating the polymer contribution to the stress tensor, which is needed to calculate velocity and pressure fields as well as other quantities of interest. In the case of a Newtonian fluid, the stress tensor is linearly proportional to the velocity gradient and is given by the Newton's law of viscosity, but no such unique constitutive equation exists for non-Newtonian fluids. In order to predict accurately a polymer's rheological properties, it is important to have a good understanding of the molecular configurations in various flow situations. To obtain this information about molecular configurations and orientations, a micromechanical representation of a polymer molecule must be proposed. A micromechanical model may be fine scale, such as the Kramers chain model, which accurately predicts a real polymer's heological properties, but at the same time possesses too many degrees of freedom to be used in complex flow simulations, or it may be a coarse-grained model, such as the Hookean or the FENE dumbbell models, which can be used in complex flow analysis, but have too few degrees of freedom to adequately describe the rheology. The Adaptive Length Scale (ALS) model proposed by Ghosh et al. is only marginally more complicated than the FENE dumbbell model, yet it is able to capture the rapid stress growth in the start-up of uniaxial elongational flow, which is not predicted correctly by the simple dumbbell models. The ALS model is optimized in order to have its simulation time as close as possible to that of the FENE dumbbell., (cont.) Subsequently, the ALS model is simulated in the start-up of the uniaxial elongational and shear flows as well as in steady extensional and shear flows, and the results are compared to those obtained with other competing rheological models such as the Kramers chain, FENE chain, and FENE dumbbell. While a 5-spring FENE chain predicts results that are in very good agreement with the Kramers chain, the required simulation time clearly makes it impossible to use this model in complex flow simulations. The ALS model agrees better with the Kramers chain than does the FENE dumbbell in the start-up of shear and elongational flows. However, the ALS model takes too long to achieve steady state, which is something that needs to be explored further before the model is used in complex flow calculations. Understanding of this phenomena may explain why the stress-birefringence hysteresis loop predicted by the ALS model is unexpectedly small. In general, if polymer stress is to be calculated using Brownian dynamics simulations, a large number of stochastic trajectories must be simulated in order to predict accurately the macroscopic quantities of interest, which makes the problem computationally expensive. However, recent technological advances as well as a new simulation algorithm called Brownian configuration fields make such problems much more tractable. The operation count in order to assess the feasibility of using the ALS model in complex flow situations yields very promising results if parallel computing is used to calculate polymer contribution to stress. In an attempt to capture polydispersity of real polymer solutions, the use of multi-mode models is explored., (cont.) The model is fit to the linear viscoelastic spectrum to obtain relaxation times and individual modes' contributions to polymer viscosity. Then, data-fitting to the dimensionless extensional viscosity in the startup of the uniaxial elongational flow is performed for the ALS and the FENE dumbbell models to obtain the molecule's contour length, bmax. It is found that the results from the single-mode and the four-mode ALS models agree much better with the experimental data than do the corresponding single-mode and four-mode FENE dumbbell models. However, all four models resulted in a poor fit to the steady shear data, which may be explained by the fact that the zero-shear-rate viscosity obtained via a fit to the dynamic data by Rothstein and McKinley and used in present simulations, tends to be somewhat lower than the steady-state shear viscosity at very low shear rates, which may have caused a mismatch between the value of ... used in the simulation and the true ... of the polymer solution. As a motivation for using the ALS model in complex flow calculations, the results by Phillips, who simulated the closed-form version of the model in the benchmark 4:1:4 contraction- expansion problem are presented and compared to the experimental results by Rothstein and McKinley [49]. While the experimental observations show that there exists a large extra pres- sure drop, which increases monotonically with increasing De above the value observed for a Newtonian fluid subjected to the same flow conditions, the simulation results with a closed-form version of the FENE dumbbell model, called FENE-CR, exhibit the opposite trend., (cont.) The ALS-C model, on the other hand, is able to predict the trend correctly. The use of the ALS-C model in another benchmark problem, namely the flow around an array of cylinders confined between two parallel plates, also shows very promising results, which are in much better agreement with experimental data by Liu as compared to the Oldroyd-B model. The simulation results for the ALS-C and the Oldroyd-B models are due to Joo, et al. [28] and Smith et al. [50], respectively. Overall, it is concluded that the ALS model is superior to the commonly used FENE dumb- bell model, although more work is needed to understand why it takes significantly longer than the FENE dumbbell to achieve steady state in uniaxial elongational flows, and why the stress birefringence hysteresis loop predicted by the ALS model is much smaller than that of the other rheological models., by Irina Burmenko., S.M.