Start-up of channel-flow of a Bingham fluid initially at rest (Q2504809)

The authors compute an analytic expression for the velocity of a Bingham fluid in a two-dimensional rectilinear flow. After some transformations, the authors introduce the problem \(\partial v/\partial T=\partial \theta /\partial \eta +H(T)\), where \(\theta \) is equal to \(\theta _{0}sign(\partial v/\partial \eta )+\partial v/\partial \eta \) and \(H(T)\) is Heaviside function. The space variable \(\eta \) belongs to \((-1,1)\). Homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions \(v(\pm 1,T)=0\) are imposed, and the solution starts from rest at \(T=0\). Restricting the domain to \(\eta \in (0,1)\) and introducing the local semi-amplitude \(\eta _{0}(T)\) of the plug, the authors finally obtain the classical heat equation \(\partial v/\partial T=\partial ^{2}v/\partial \eta ^{2}+H(T)\) with Neumann boundary condition \(\partial v/\partial \eta =0\) on \(\eta =\eta _{0}(T)\). The authors compute the Laplace transform of the solution of this evolution problem and then apply the inverse Laplace transform. From this series solution, the authors derive curves describing the dependence of velocity, of the thickness of the plug, of the shear stress and of the rate of the flow on the temperature, for various data of the problem.