Viscoelastic Flow Through an Axisymmetric Sudden Contraction

Polymer fluid mechanics is of primary importance to processing operations which range from extrusion and fiber spinning to packaging microelectronic devices. In many of these operations, the rate of production is limited by the onset of flow instabilities which are related to the viscoelastic character of the fluid. Flow through an axisymmetric sudden contraction has been commonly used as a test problem for the evaluation of numerical solution techniques for viscoelastic flows. In the present work, laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) was used to map velocity fields in viscoelastic flow through a 4:1 contraction.