Stability of plane Poiseuille and Couette flow of a Maxwell fluid (Q1072842)

The classical Orr-Sommerfeld analysis is extended to a Maxwell fluid in fully developed Poiseuille flow between two flat plates and Couette flow between two flat plates. For the Poiseuille flow problem eigenmodes that are anti-symmetric in position are considered to augment the literature results for the symmetric eigenmodes. A shooting method with a stiff integrator, orthonormalization, and Newton-Raphson iterations on the eigenvalue are used to find the eigenvalues. The most dangerous mode is the anti-symmetric one, and both symmetric and anti-symmetric modes are more dangerous when the wave number and the Weissenberg number are large. No unstable eigenvalues are found.