Orientation kinematics of short fibres in a second-order viscoelastic fluid

Most theoretical fibre suspension models currently used for predicting the flow-induced evolution of microstructure in the processing of reinforced thermoplastics are based on the Jeffery model of dilute suspensions in a Newtonian suspending fluid or phenomenological adaptations of it that account for fibre-fibre interactions. An important assumption of all these models is the Newtonian character of the fluid in which the fibres are suspended. In industrial practice, the considered fluids are in general molten thermoplastics that exhibit a viscoelastic behaviour. Even though few counterparts of the Jeffery theory exist for second-order fluids, they have been rarely considered and, to our knowledge, never taken into account at the macroscopic scale. In this paper, we address the modelling of short fibre suspensions in second-order fluids throughout the different description scales, from microscopic to macroscopic. We propose a simplified modelling framework that allows one to extend to viscoelastic suspending fluids the standard Folgar and Tucker model widely used in industrial simulation software.