Issues in Viscoelastic Fluid Mechanics

Polymer solutions and melts are viscoelastic; they exhibit fluidlike behavior in steady shear, but the initial response to an imposed deformation involves a material-dependent transient that may be many orders of magnitude longer than time scales associated with instrument inertia. Intrinsic material time scales can be identified with the dynamics of the macro­ molecular chains. Shaping processes for polymeric materials are usually carried out in the liquid state, often over times that are rapid relative to those associated with molecular reorganization; the viscoelasticity is thus relevant to any understanding of flow and structure development. The distinction between the rheology and the fluid mechanics of visco­ elastic materials is vague but is worth stating. The former is concerned with constitutive relations between stress and deformation and may involve physical modeling at a molecular level. Controllability of the flow field is essential when making rheological measurements to evaluate material properties, so the kinematics are generally imposed and the momentum equation is not solved. Viscoelastic fluid mechanics, on the other hand, is the study of motions in which the kinematics cannot be established a priori, and the continuity and momentum equations must be solved together with the constitutive equation for the stress. The equations that must be solved for even the most elementary viscoelastic liquids are considerably more complex than the Navier-Stokes equations, and many unresolved issues of a fundamental nature remain. Students of viscoelastic fluid mechanics