G-convergence and homogenization of viscoelastic flows

TL;DR

This paper develops a novel homogenization approach for two-phase viscoelastic flows with complex microstructures, revealing that the effective medium exhibits a long memory viscoelastic behavior with non-local in time constitutive relations.

Contribution

It introduces new non-local in time test functions for G-convergence in viscoelastic flow homogenization without assuming periodicity or scale separation.

Findings

Effective medium is a single phase viscoelastic material.

The homogenized model includes long memory effects.

The approach handles arbitrary interface geometries.

Abstract

The paper is devoted to homogenization of two-phase incompressible viscoelastic flows with disordered microstructure. We study two cases. In the first case, both phases are modeled as Kelvin-Voight viscoelastic materials. In the second case, one phase is a Kelvin-Voight material, and the other is a viscous Newtonian fluid. The microscale system contains the conservation of mass and balance of momentum equations. The inertial terms in the momentum equation incorporate the actual interface advected by the flow. In the constitutive equations, a frozen interface is employed. The interface geometry is arbitrary: we do not assume periodicity, statistical homogeneity or scale separation. The problem is homogenized using G-convergence and oscillating test functions. Since the microscale system is not parabolic, previously known constructions of the test functions do not work here. The test functions developed in the paper are non-local in time and satisfy divergence-free constraint exactly. The latter feature enables us to avoid working with pressure directly. We show that the effective medium is a single phase viscoelastic material that is not necessarily of Kelvin-Voight type. The effective constitutive equation contains a long memory viscoelastic term, as well as instantaneous elastic and viscous terms.