Weakly nonlinear analysis of the viscoelastic instability in channel flow for finite and vanishing Reynolds numbers

TL;DR

This paper uses weakly nonlinear analysis to show that viscoelastic shear flow instability is primarily elastic, occurs at low Reynolds numbers, and can be triggered at lower Weissenberg numbers with realistic polymer models, indicating nonlinear instability.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the viscoelastic instability is mainly elastic and subcritical, and introduces the impact of finite polymer extension on the neutral curve and instability thresholds.

Findings

Instability is elastic in origin even at Re ~ 10^3.

Introducing maximum polymer extension length lowers the instability threshold.

Flow is nonlinearly unstable at lower Wi than previously reported.

Abstract

The recently-discovered centre-mode instability of rectilinear viscoelastic shear flow (Garg et al. Phy. Rev. Lett. 121, 024502, 2018) has offered an explanation for the origin of elasto-inertial turbulence (EIT) which occurs at lower Weissenberg ($Wi$) numbers. In support of this, we show using weakly nonlinear analysis that the subcriticality found in Page et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 154501, 2020) is generic across the neutral curve with the instability only becoming supercritical at low Reynolds ($Re$) numbers and high $Wi$. We demonstrate that the instability can be viewed as purely elastic in origin even for $Re=O(10^3)$, rather than `elasto-inertial', as the underlying shear does not energise the instability. It is also found that the introduction of a realistic maximum polymer extension length, $L_{max}$, in the FENE-P model moves the neutral curve closer to the inertialess $Re=0$ limit at a fixed ratio of solvent-to-solution viscosities, $\beta$. In the dilute limit ($\beta \rightarrow 1$) with $L_{max} =O(100)$, the linear instability can brought down to more physically-relevant $Wi\gtrsim 110$ at $\beta=0.98$, compared with the threshold $Wi=O(10^3)$ at $\beta=0.994$ reported recently by Khalid et al. (arXiv: 2103.06794) for an Oldroyd-B fluid. Again the instability is subcritical implying that inertialess rectilinear viscoelastic shear flow is nonlinearly unstable - i.e. unstable to finite amplitude disturbances - for even lower $Wi$.