The stresses of an upper convected Maxwell fluid in a Newtonian velocity field near a re-entrant corner (Q1321576)

The paper concerns the problem of the Maxwell fluid flow in the neighborhood of a re-entrant corner. The main assumption is that the velocity field is assumed of the Newtonian type. The upper convected Maxwell (UCM) fluid is chosen because it appears to have the most singular behavior at the corner, and it causes the most severe numerical problems. Both asymptotic analysis and numerical solutions are presented, and it is found that, for a fixed angle, the stresses behave approximately as \(r^{-0.74}\), which contrasts with the behavior as \(r^{-0.91}\) at the walls. It is known that numerical computations for the UCM always seem to show very large stresses near the wall downstream from the corner. The obtained results suggest that these large stresses may well be an artefact of poor approximation.