On the transient coating of a straight tube with a viscoelastic material

We examine the pressure-driven coating of a straight, long tube with a finite amount of viscoelastic liquid. This combines the formation and elongation of an open bubble pushing the liquid downstream with the motion of the advancing liquid front and the deposition of a film along the tube wall. The mixed finite element method is combined with the discontinuous Galerkin method for computing the polymeric contribution to the stress tensor, while a quasi-elliptic grid generation scheme is used for tessellating the highly deforming domain. Global remeshing is adopted to overcome local distortion and coarsening of the mesh which arises from the attachment of advancing front nodes on the wall. The accuracy of the solution is achieved by selectively refining the mesh along areas where sharp boundary layers in stress arise and in particular at the bubble front. An extensive parametric analysis is performed using the affine, single-mode Phan-Tien and Tanner constitutive model. The thickness of the remaining film increases as the solvent contribution to viscosity decreases, because of the sharply increased normal viscoelastic stresses along the bubble front. The effect of decreasing the extensional parameter epsilon(PTT) is similar because this decreases the shear and extensional thinning in the liquid. The transient nature of the process delays the development of the viscoelastic stresses as the Deborah number increases. The streamlines relative to the liquid tip follow the usual 'fountain flow' pattern as long as the bubble and the liquid front do not interact. The non-affine, multi-mode PTT model with constants obtained from the literature for a PIB solution in C14 predicts a slightly thinner deposited film and a flatter bubble front because of its stronger shear thinning. Moreover, it predicts a higher dimensionless bubble velocity because of the very small viscosity ratio of the solvent and a V-shape in the radial distribution of the first normal stress difference and the birefringence just behind the contact line in qualitative agreement with experiments and theory for planar fountain flow. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.