Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2016) 131: 388
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2016-16388-7

Regular Article

Dissipative particle dynamics simulation for the density currents of polymer fluids

¹ Key Laboratory of Space Applied Physics and Chemistry of Ministry of Education, School of Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 710129, Xi’an, China
² Department of Applied Mathematics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, 710129, Xi’an, China

^* e-mail: jieouyang@nwpu.edu.cn

Received: 4 July 2016
Accepted: 7 October 2016
Published online: 7 November 2016

Abstract

In this work, the two-dimensional lock-exchange density currents of polymer fluids are numerically investigated using dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) at the mesoscale particle level. A modified finitely extensible nonlinear elastic (FENE) chain model is chosen to describe the polymer system, which perfectly depicts not only the elastic tension but also the elastic repulsion between the adjacent beads with bond length as the equilibrium length of one segment. Through the model and numerical simulation, we analyze the dynamics behavior of the density currents of polymer fluids. A comparison with its Newtonian counterpart suggests that the interface between two polymer fluids is more smoothed, and the front structure is different from the Newtonian case because the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and cleft instability are suppressed by the polymer. Besides, we also probe the influences of polymer volume concentration, chain length and extensibility on the density currents. These simulation results show that increasing any of the parameters, concentration, chain length, and extensibility, the inhibiting effect of polymer on the density currents becomes more significant.