Subcritical finite-amplitude solutions for plane Couette flow of viscoelastic fluids

Plane Couette flow of viscoelastic fluids is shown to exhibit a purely elastic subcritical instability at a very small-Reynolds number in spite of being linearly stable. The mechanism of this instability is proposed and the nonlinear stability analysis of plane Couette flow of the Upper-Convected Maxwell fluid is presented. Above a critical Weissenberg number, a small finite-size perturbation is sufficient to create a secondary flow, and the threshold value for the amplitude of the perturbation decreases as the Weissenberg number increases. The results suggest a scenario for weakly turbulent viscoelastic flow which is similar to the one for Newtonian fluids as a function of Reynolds number.