Simulation of Free Surface Viscoelastic Fluid Flow Using the viscoelasticInterFoam Solver

The understanding of polymeric fluids flows is of essential importance for several industry sectors, including plastic and food processing industries. The rheological response of viscoelastic fluids is quite complex, including combination of viscous and elastic effects and highly non-linear viscous and elastic phenomena. In a previous work we presented a solver for internal viscoelastic fluid flows, called viscoelasticFluidFoam, which was developed with the OpenFOAM computational fluid dynamics package and validated with experimental and numerical data from the literature for the analysis of a planar 4:1 contraction flow. In the present work will be tested the extension of the viscoelasticFluidFoam solver to the viscoelasticInterFoam solver used for analysis of free surface viscoelastic fluid flows using the VOF methodology. A classical die swell flow phenomena used in the rheology literature to present the concept of viscoelastic effects was simulated. The results obtained using Giesekus model showed the great potential of the developed formulation, once all phenomena observed experimentally were reproduced in the simulations.