Influence Study of the Viscoelastic Fluids Features in Drag Reduction in Laminar Regime Flow in Pipeline

Abstract

The drag reduction by polymer addition is wide interest in several areas. It has been shown that the polymer addition cushions the dissipative effects in turbulent flows. The main objective of this work is to establish a methodology for the numerical simulation of viscoelastic fluid through internal subroutines implemented in the Fluent code, via UDF. The validation of this methodology is made for the laminar flow regime case in pipeline. To describe the viscoelastic effect, it was used the Finitely Extensible Nonlinear Elastic model closing with Peterlin model. To taking in account the viscous effects 50≤Re≤2000 values were used. In addition, for the polymer concentration analysis it was used values which depend on the polymers molecular weight and the solution concentration that ranged from 0≤Cw≤20. The molecular elasticity and extensibility were maintained at constant values. The results showed that the addition of polymers regardless of their molecular weight in laminar flow regime causes no change in power dissipation. This result, which is consistent with the literature, is a significant advance in defining a credible and appropriate methodology to viscoelastic fluid flow study by UDF implementation of constituent models that characterize these fluids.