Joint work with Omar Mokhtari, Michel Quintard and Jean-Claude Latché.
The flow of viscoelastic fluids past solid obstacles leads to the formation of thin and long structures of extremely large stress that are often termed « birefringent strands ». Capturing such structures has proven an important computational challenge. In the first part of this talk, I will present a new staggered projection scheme for viscoelastic flows, along with validation cases for the lid-driven cavity problem and flow around a confined cylinder. We will see that this scheme has a space semi-discretization that is consistent with a free-energy estimate, is well suited to high-performance computations (HPC), shows good accuracy in capturing the strands and can be readily used for a variety of viscoelastic constitutive laws such as Oldroyd or FENE-type models. It is also implemented for HPC and available through the CALIF3S open-source platform developed at the Institut de Radioprotection et Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN). In the second part of this talk, I will show results for the flow of viscoelastic fluids through arrays of cylinders and discuss dissipation mechanisms in such systems.