A Higher-order Upwind Method for Viscoelastic Flow

A conservative finite difference method designed to capture elastic wave propagation in viscoelastic fluids in two space dimensions is presented. The governing equations are the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations coupled to the Oldroyd-B constitutive equations for viscoelastic stress. The equations are cast into a hybrid conservation form to make use of a second-order upwind method to treat the hyperbolic part of the equations. The hyperbolic step also utilizes a new exact and efficient Riemann solver. A numerical stress splitting technique provides a well-posed discretization for the entire range of Newtonian and elastic fluids. Incompressibility is enforced through both a projection method and a special partitioning of variables which suppresses compressive waves in the hyperbolic step. An embedded boundary approach for irregular geometry is employed, in which regular Cartesian cells are cut into irregular control volumes, requiring special discretization stencils. The resulting method is second-order accurate in L1 for smooth geometries for a range of Oldroyd-B fluids.