Subcritical instabilities in plane Poiseuille flow of an Oldroyd-B fluid

Abstract

Recently, detailed experiments on visco-elastic channel flow have provided convincing evidence for a nonlinear instability scenario which we had argued for based on calculations for visco-elastic Couette flow. Motivated by these experiments we extend the previous calculations to the case of visco-elastic Poiseuille flow, using the Oldroyd-B constitutive model. Our results confirm that the subcritical instability scenario is similar for both types of flow, and that the nonlinear transition occurs for Weissenberg numbers somewhat larger than one. We provide detailed results for the convergence of our expansion and for the spatial structure of the mode that drives the instability. This also gives insight into possible similarities with the mechanism of the transition to turbulence in Newtonian pipe flow.