Bubble growth and collapse in viscoelastic liquids analyzed (Q2265891)

Time-dependent, purely radial, incompressible, irrotational, extensional flow around a spherical bubble growing or collapsing in viscoelastic liquid is analyzed by means of a new integral constitutive equation of BKZ type designed for any mixture of extensional and shear flow. It requires the history of the relative deformation Finger tensor, which is readily evaluated in the spherosymmetric flow with its straight pathlines. The continuity equation relates radial velocity simply to bubble wall speed, and the momentum equation reduces to a nonlinear integrodifferential equation for the evolution of the bubble radius. This equation is discretized by means of linear basis functions on finite elements of time and Galerkin's weighted residual method; the set of nonlinear algebraic equations is solved by Newton iteration, which converges quadratically up to a Deborah number (extension rate at bubble wall times average relaxation time) of 60.