A numerical closure approach for kinetic models of polymeric fluids: Exploring closure relations for FENE dumbbells

We propose a numerical procedure to study closure approximations for FINE dumbbells in terms of chosen macroscopic state variables, enabling to test straightforwardly which macroscopic state variables should be included to build good closures. The method involves the reconstruction of a polymer distribution related to the conditional equilibrium of a microscopic Monte Carlo simulation, conditioned upon the desired macroscopic state. We describe the procedure in detail, give numerical results for several strategies to define the set of macroscopic state variables, and show that the resulting closures are related to those obtained by a so-called quasi-equilibrium approximation [20]. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.