The initial value problem for creeping flow of the upper convected Maxwell fluid at high Weissenberg number

We consider the equations for time dependent creeping flow of an upper convected Maxwell fluid. For finite Weissenberg number, these equations can be reformulated as a coupled system of a hyperbolic equation for the stresses and an elliptic equation for the velocity. In the high Weissenberg number limit, however, the elliptic equation becomes degenerate. As a consequence, the initial value problem is no longer uniquely solvable if we just naively let the Weissenberg number go to infinity in the equations. In this paper, we make an a priori assumption on the stresses, which is motivated by the behavior in shear flow. We formulate a systematic perturbation procedure to solve the resulting initial value problem. Copyright © 2014 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd.