학술논문

On convergent schemes for a two-phase Oldroyd-B type model with variable polymer density
Document Type
research-article
Source
Journal of Numerical Mathematics. 28(2):99-129
Subject
two-phase flow
Cahn–Hilliard equation
Oldroyd-B model
finite element approximation
existence of weak solutions
convergence analysis
35Q35
76A05
76D03
76T99
35Q30
65M12
Language
English
ISSN
1569-3953
1570-2820
Abstract
The paper is concerned with a diffuse-interface model that describes two-phase flow of dilute polymeric solutions with a variable particle density. The additional stresses, which arise by elongations of the polymers caused by deformations of the fluid, are described by Kramers stress tensor. The evolution of Kramers stress tensor is modeled by an Oldroyd-B type equation that is coupled to a Navier–Stokes type equation, a Cahn–Hilliard type equation, and a parabolic equation for the particle density. We present a regularized finite element approximation of this model, prove that our scheme is energy stable and that there exist discrete solutions to it. Furthermore, in the case of equal mass densities and two space dimensions, we are able to pass to the limit rigorously as the regularization parameters and the spatial and temporal discretization parameters tend towards zero and prove that a subsequence of discrete solutions converges to a global-in-time weak solution to the unregularized coupled system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first existence result for a two-phase flow model of viscoelastic fluids with an Oldroyd-B type equation. Additionally, we show that our finite element scheme is fully practical and we present numerical simulations.