Viscoelastic fluid analysis in internal and in free surface flows using the software OpenFOAM

Synthetic polymer products are of great importance in several industrial sectors, such as for production of packaging, parts of appliances, electronics, cars and food processing industries. Due to the increasing demand for this kind of material, reduction of waste and increase of quality has become a key issue in polymer industry. In this sense modeling and simulation of processing operations appears as a fundamental tool, leading to better understanding of how the rheological properties of polymers affect their processability and final product quality, and reducing time and costs related to the development of processes and products. This work presents some basic results that aims to validate a developed methodology for internal viscoelastic fluid flows, which was developed in a previous work in the OpenFOAM computational fluid dynamics package and also will be showed a extension of this methodology for analysis of free surface viscoelastic fluid flows, using the VOF methodology. A classical flow phenomena used in the rheology literature to present the concept of viscoelastic effects was simulated, i.e., the die swell experiment. The results obtained using Giesekus model showed the great potential of the developed formulation, once phenomena observed experimentally were reproduced in the simulations. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.