Simulation of a viscoelastic Taylor-Couette flow

Since the early stages of Computational Rheology the Taylor-Couette geometry received a lot of attention from researchers, up to becoming one of the benchmark problem of viscoleastic flows. In particular, the circular bounding geometry, together with the shear driven characteristic, allowed to gain relevant insight about the relation between the distortion of polymer conformation, and the arise of elastic instabilities. The present document has the purpose of presenting the thesis project results, concerning the numerical investigation of a Taylor-Couette geometry through the newly developed viscoelastic toolbox Rheotool of OpenFOAM. The simulations have been performed for increasing values of Weissemberg number, with the aim of detecting the effect of polymer stretching on the arise and development of particular fluid dynamic structures; furthermore, to understand the effect of space refinement on motion evolution, three different meshes have been used, exploiting also a new available stabilization technique based on stress-velocity coupling to avoid numerical breakdown.