Linear stability analysis of time-dependent algorithms with spectral element methods for the simulation of viscoelastic flows (Q1434708)

The authors study the influence of constitutive models, the spatial discretization, the time scales, the various operators present in the conservation and constitutive equations and the boundary conditions on the stability of numerical simulations. Two formulations of general eigenvalue problems are introduced to study particularly the influence of the time discretization. Such an analysis is an efficient tool to determine the effects of adding new terms in the equations, modifying the weak formulations (including stabilization techniques) and treating differently operators. For a fixed channel length, improving the mesh refinement in the cross-stream direction reduces the spectrum expansion in the direction of the real axis and thus improves the stability of simulations when the Weissenberg number increases. For fixed polynomial orders, the authors show that increasing the channel length helps in reducing the spectrum expansion in the direction of the real axis and therefore in stabilizing the simulations.