Viscoplastic Poiseuille flow in a rectangular duct with wall slip

Abstract

We solve numerically the Poiseuille flow of a Herschel-Bulkley fluid in a duct of rectangular cross section under the assumption that slip occurs along the wall following a slip law involving a non-zero slip yield stress. The constitutive equation is regularized as proposed by Papanastasiou. In addition, we propose a new regularized slip equation which is valid uniformly at any wall shear stress level by means of another regularization parameter. Four different flow regimes are observed defined by three critical values of the pressure gradient. Initially no slip occurs, in the second regime slip occurs only in the middle of the wider wall, in the third regime slip occurs partially at both walls, and eventually variable slip occurs everywhere. The performance of the regularized slip equation in the two intermediate regimes in which wall slip is partial has been tested for both Newtonian and Bingham flows. The convergence of the results with the Papanastasiou regularization parameter has been also studied. The combined effects of viscoplasticity and slip are then investigated. Results are presented for wide ranges of the Bingham and slip numbers and for various values of the power-law exponent and the duct aspect ratio. These compare favorably with available theoretical results and with numerical results in the literature obtained with both regularization and augmented Lagrangian methods. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.