Development of an interface-tracking numerical algorithm for the simulation of viscoelastic free-surface flows

Abstract

Extrudate swell (ES) is a well-known phenomenon exhibited by viscous fluids exiting confined flow channels. This phenomena is of major interest in general polymer processing applications. For instance, the swelling phenomenon appears in the extrusion process when the melted polymer is pushed out of the extrusion die, which might distort significantly the extruded profile.Development of computational methods for numerical modelling of free-surface fluid flow is a very active research area. The moving mesh (MM) methods, also known as MM interface tracking (IT) methods, offer potentially the highest accuracy in multiphase flows, since the interface between the phases is sharply represented by the computational boundary.This project aims at employing a MM IT method implemented in OpenFOAM for simulating 3D incompressible free-surface flows for the benchmark problem of ES. The available algorithm to simulate Newtonian ES will be expanded to take into account non-Newtonian viscoelastic fluids. The validation of such algorithm is computationally expensive and should be done using HPC facilities. (AU)