A convective weakly viscoelastic rotating flow with pressure Neumann condition

The objective of this work is to investigate through the numeric simulation, the effects of the weakly viscoelastic flow within a rotating rectangular duct subject to a buoyancy force due to the heating of one of the walls of the duct. A direct velocity–pressure algorithm in primitive variables with a Neumann condition for the pressure is employed. The spatial discretization is made with finite central differences on a staggered grid. The pressure field is directly updated without any iteration. Numerical simulations were done for several Weissemberg numbers ( We ) and Grashof numbers ( Gr ) . The numerical results show that for high Weissemberg numbers ( We >7.4 × 10 −5 ) and for ducts with aspect ratio 2:1 and 8:1, the secondary flow is restabilized with a stretched double vortex configuration. It is also observed that when the Grashof number is increased ( Gr >17 × 10 −4 ) , the buoyancy force neutralizes the effects of the Coriolis force for ducts with aspect ratio 8:1. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.