SPH simulations of transient non-isothermal viscoelastic flows with free surfaces

This study presents a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method for simulating transient non-isothermal viscoelastic flows with free surfaces. The basic equations governing the non-isothermal free surface flow of an Oldroyd-B fluid are considered and approximated by SPH. To model non-isothermal fluid flows, a working SPH discretization of the temperature equation is derived, and the temperature-dependent viscosity and relaxation time are represented by the time–temperature superposition principle. The proposed SPH method is first validated by solving the viscoelastic Poiseuille flow problem under isothermal and non-isothermal conditions and comparing the SPH solutions with the analytical solutions or those obtained by other methods. Then, the SPH method is extended to deal with the impact of a non-isothermal viscoelastic droplet with a cold wall and the non-isothermal filling process of a circular disc with a core. The convergence of the method is verified by four particle spacings of different levels of refinement. The effects of some important parameters, including the temperature dependency coefficient, reference temperature of the fluid, and Péclet number, on the flow behavior are analyzed in detail. All the results demonstrate that the proposed SPH method is capable of accurately and stably simulating transient non-isothermal viscoelastic free surface flows in an entirely meshfree framework.