Flow Patterns of Viscoelastic Fluids in a Planar Contraction Obtained With a Finite-Volume Simulation

A new general finite-volume method based on an efficient collocated mesh arrangement, with the added advantage of indirect addressing, has been applied to predict the flow of UCM fluids in a 4:1 sudden planar contraction. First and second order differencing schemes were used, and the Deborah number ranged from 0 to 10 for a Reynolds number of 0.01. The predicted flow patterns showed all the flow features seen in flow visualisation and in recent numerical simulations of contraction flows, namely the corner Moffat vortex, the lip vortex, the fingering and merging of the two vortex types and single vortex growth with Deborah number. The presence of a lip vortex is detected at a Deborah number of 2 and the observations of those flow features requires very fine meshes in the vicinity of the contraction plane.