Time-dependent finite element analysis of the linear stability of viscoelastic flows with interfaces (Q1434718)

The authors study the stability of viscoelastic plane shear flows of single and two-layer superposed upper-convected Maxwell fluids. They develop a numerical scheme that is able to efficiently handle stability problems of viscoelastic flows in complex domains with fluid-gas or fluid-fluid interfaces. Using a generalized eigenvalue analysis of shear flows, the authors have benchmarked their new time marching technique and the handling of the perturbations of the computational domain. It is confirmed that the authors' method is capable of accurately predicting exponential growth of both single and multilayer flows up to considerable values of Weissenberg number.