EXTENSIONAL FLOW OF A SUSPENSION OF FIBERS IN A DILUTE POLYMER-SOLUTION

The extensional properties of a suspension of slender fibers in a dilute polymer solution at high Deborah numbers are derived by modeling the polymer solution as an anisotropic viscous fluid. The fiber stress is found to exceed its value in a Newtonian fluid with the same shear viscosity by at most a factor of log r (where r is the aspect ratio of the fiber). There is, however, a change to the form of the velocity disturbance caused by a fiber resulting in a decrease in the orientational dispersion due to fiber-fiber interactions.