Complex fluids which simultaneously have elastic and plastic behaviors are ubiquitous in every day life (ketchup, chocolate), nature (fluids and materials in the human body), and various industries such as food, process, chemical and pharmaceutical.
The precise modeling of such Elasto-Visco-Plastic fluids flow around particles and obstacles is essential because it improves the efficiency of many engineering processes from macro- to microscale(e.g. microfluidics). Three-dimensional elastic instabilities are yet poorly understood.
The main objective of the present study is to carry out pioneering three-dimensional direct numerical simulations (DNS) of low Reynolds number EVP fluid flow past a cylinder embedded in a channel. Besides exploring the combined effects of elasticity and plasticity, we include shear-thinning and thickening effects present in real-life flows.
Numerical simulations will be performed with a finite-difference (FD), immersed boundary method (IBM)to present a cylinder inside the domain. The incompressible Navier-Stokes equations are solved using an efficient FFT-based pressure solver, allowing massively parallel simulations of the corresponding flow, fully coupled with the solution of the EVP tensor components from Saramito Herschel–Bulkley equation (SHB) to describe the rheology of the fluid.
The proposed research is expected to reveal exciting new insights and open the door for novel applications.