Numerical solution for unsteady Couette flow of viscoplastic fluids

Many fluids which are of interest in engineering, as bentonite, slurries, fresh concrete, ceramic past, molten polymers, behave as Bingham fluids, i.e. fluids which present a yield stress. This paper investigates numerically the unsteady motion between two coaxial cylinders when the internal one rotates about its axis. The constitutive law of the fluid presents a discontinuity for zero shear rate, which introduces severe difficulties in solving any problem of unsteady motion, both analytically and numerically. A suitable way to avoid the obstacle is to regularize the constitutive equation using a smooth function to approximate the Bingham law: in this paper the suggested law is based on the error function. Different procedures of start-up and cessation of flow are examined numerically using an implicit finite difference method