We developed a lattice Boltzmann method coupled with the Oldroyd-B constitutive equation to simulate a viscoelastic fluid. In this work, the flow field of the solvent is solved using an incompressible lattice Boltzmann Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) model, while the advection operator of the polymer stress tensor is directly calculated with the help of the particle distribution functions. Specifically, we present a numerical scheme for the advection of the polymer stress tensor through the truncation of second-order Taylor expansion, which does not need to introduce the extra distribution functions and has better numerical accuracy. We consider two types of numerical tests to examine the performance of the presented method, including a two-dimensional (2D) channel flow and the 4:1 contraction problem. Our numerical results for the 2D channel flow agree well with the analytical results and some experimental results reported in the previous studies. Moreover, the numerical results also indicate that the current method can capture some complex rheological behaviors of the 4:1 contraction flow.

• Received 9 June 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.88.053304