Instability of plane Couette flow of viscoelastic liquids (Q1067516)

The authors review their own work on stability of plane Couette flow of viscoelastic fluids in two parts. In the first part it is assumed that the fluid has short memory with respect to disturbances in the basic flow. The Reynolds-Orr energy criterion exhibits instability at very low Reynolds numbers. Linear stability analysis shows that outside the stability region there also exist disturbances which grow with time. The range of validity of the short memory assumption is severely restricted for most fluids of practical importance. The second part drops the short memory assumption and analyzes the stability of plane Couette flow for a Maxwell fluid. It is shown that this flow is unstable if the product of Reynolds number and Weissenberg number is greater than unity. For more general fluids with finite memory no definite results are available.