Polymer Effects on Heat Transport in Laminar Boundary Layer Flow

TL;DR

This paper investigates how polymer additives influence heat transfer in laminar boundary layer flow, revealing that polymers modify effective viscosity, which impacts velocity profiles and reduces heat transport.

Contribution

It introduces a model where polymers act as a space-dependent effective viscosity, affecting flow dynamics and heat transfer in laminar boundary layers.

Findings

Polymer additives increase effective viscosity near the boundary.

Heat transport decreases due to reduced velocities caused by polymers.

Friction drag increases with polymer presence.

Abstract

We consider a laminar Blasius boundary-layer flow above a slightly heated horizontal plate and study the effect of polymer additives on the heat transport. We show that the action of the polymers can be understood as a space-dependent effective viscosity that first increases from the zero-shear value then decreases exponentially back to the zero-shear value as one moves away from the boundary. We find that with such an effective viscosity, both the horizontal and vertical velocities near the plate are decreased thus leading to an increase in the friction drag and a decrease in the heat transport in the flow.