Performance of an elasto-viscoplastic model in some benchmark problems

A recent elasto-viscoplastic thixotropic model proposed by (de Souza Mendes in J. Non-Newton. Fluid Mech. 164:66–75, 2009; de Souza Mendes in Soft Matter 7:2471–2483, 2011) is applied to five benchmark problems: the flow in a lid cavity, the flow through an expansion followed by a contraction, the flow over a flat plate, the channel entry flow, and the flow around a cylinder confined between parallel plates. One of the main advantages of this approach is its ability to recover a model for elasto-viscoplastic materials in a smooth fashion, i.e., in the limit where the characteristic thixotropic time tends to zero. These problems are numerically solved using the finite element method, with a four-field GLS-type formulation. While the simplified version is applied to the first three problems, the full model including thixotropy is applied to the channel entry flow and the flow around the cylinder. The elasto-viscoplastic problems analyzed show that, in general, elasticity tends to inhibit yielding and is more concentrated in unyielded regions. The thixotropic effects analyzed show that the delay in the microstructure response of the material significantly alters the problem when compared to the pure elasto-viscoplastic counterpart.