| Abstract: | We investigate the stresses of an upper convected Maxwell fluid in the neighborhood of a re-entrant 270° corner. It is assumed (incorrectly, of course) that the velocity field is Newtonian. Both asymptotic analysis and numerical solutions are presented. It is found that, for a fixed angle, the stresses behave approximately as r−0.74, which contrasts with a behavior as r−0.91 at the walls (the latter is simply the square of the Newtonian shear rate at the wall, where the flow is viscometric). The analysis shows that there are boundary layers near the walls, in which there is a transition from the viscometric behavior at the wall to a core region which the behavior is dominated by the convected derivative in the constitutive equation. Moreover, our computations show large spurious stresses downstream resulting from numerical errors. |
