Viscoelastic mobility problem using a boundary element method

In this paper, the complete double layer boundary integral equation formulation for Stokes flows is extended to viscoelastic fluids to solve the mobility problem for a particle in an unbounded body of fluid, where the non-linearity is handled by using particular solutions of the Stokes inhomogeneous equation. Some meshless techniques are employed and a point-wise solver is used to solve the viscoelastic constitutive equation, avoiding volume meshing. The method is tested against the numerical solution for a sphere settling in an unbounded Oldroyd-B fluid. Some results on a prolate motion in shear flow for the Oldroyd-B fluid are reported and compared qualitatively with some theoretical and experimental results. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.