Viscoelastic Subdiffusive Flows: Theory and Computation

This book discusses the dynamical and rheological properties of high molecular weight entangled polymer melts, commonly known as viscoelastic subdiffusive fluids. Unlike dilute liquids, these materials exhibit molecular transport within a sublinear regime, meaning the timescale of diffusive transport is sublinear. The text emphasizes the potential of fractional calculus in modeling these fluids and introduces a novel fractional model to investigate regions of spatiotemporal instability in channel flows. At the microscale, the entanglement of polymer chains leads to localized, non-homogeneous regions with increased viscosity, which manifest as spatiotemporal macrostructures at the macroscale. To capture these macrostructures within the flow, direct numerical simulations are employed using a newly developed, physically realizable structure tensor, contributing to a deeper understanding of this complex class of fluids.