Unsteady rotating shear flow of power law fluids (Q1324256)

Unsteady circular Couette flow of non-Newtonian fluids of power law behaviour is investigated considering two specific problems: (i) a solid cylinder rotating in a power law fluid of infinite extent, and (ii) a power law fluid filling the gap between two concentric rotating cylinders. The analytic similarity and numerical solutions are obtained. The author observes that velocity disturbances from a rotating cylinder propagate through the fluid with finite speed due to the nonlinearity of non-Newtonian constitutive equations. The method of lines combined with the shooting method, and a front fixing transformation are used; the velocity and shear stress distributions for the solid cylinder case are determined by using various implicit Crank-Nicolson finite difference schemes, while in the case of two cylinders the velocity distribution is obtained via the method of lines together with a variable step size finite difference method. The temperature distribution for both problems is obtained numerically using an implicit finite difference method. The interaction effect between the angular velocity and the thermal field is also discussed.