Vortex behavior in the inertial flow of viscoelastic fluids past a confined cylinder

The effect of molecular parameters on the steady vortex behaviors in the inertial viscoelastic flow past a cylinder has been investigated. FENE-CR model was considered as a constitutive equation. A recently developed iterative solution method (Kim et al., (in press)) was found to be successfully applicable to the computation of inertial viscoelastic flows. The high-resolution computations were carried out to understand the detailed flow behaviors based on the efficient iterative solution method armed with ILU(O) type preconditioner and BiCGSTAB method. The discrete elastic viscous split stress-G/streamline upwind Petrov Galerkin (DEVSS-G/SUPG) formulation was adopted as a stabilization method. The vortex size decreased as elasticity increases. However, the vortex enhancement was also observed in the case of large extensibility, which means that the vortex behavior is strongly dependent upon the material parameters. The longitudinal gradient of normal stress was found to retard the formation of vortex, whereas the extensional viscosity played a role in the vortex enhancement. The present results are expected to be helpful for understanding the inertial vortex dynamics of viscoelastic fluids in the flow past a confined cylinder.