Molecular models and flow calculations: II. Simulation of steady planar flow

A multibead-rod model is used to replace the constitutive equation of continuum mechanics in solving flow problems of steady-state planar flows of rigid-rodlike molecular suspensions. The governing equations then constitute a set of differential equations of the elliptic type, which is more amenable to numerical treatment than those of the mixed type. The conservation equations of the flow fields are solved by the boundary element method with linear boundary elements in physical space and the diffusion equation of the distribution function is solved separately by the Galerkin method in phase space. The solution to the flow problem is obtained when the convergence of the iteration procedure between the two spaces has been reached. Several numerical examples are shown and the interesting features of the present method are discussed in this paper. The project supported by the National Nature Science Fundation of China.