Control of homogeneous shear flow of multimode Maxwell fluids

We consider a homogeneous parallel shear flow of a multimode Maxwell fluid. This problem results in a set of ordinary differential equations for the stresses. In this system, we view the shear rate as a control and consider the problem of steering the system to a given state of stress. The objective is to steer the system from given initial stresses to a final state of stress, allowing the shear rate to vary in an arbitrary fashion. We show that this problem is related to a calculus of variations problem. For the case of two modes, we obtain a characterization of the set of achievable streses.