A deterministic–particle–based scheme for micro-macro viscoelastic flows

In this article, we introduce a new method for discretizing micro-macro models of dilute polymeric fluids by integrating a finite element method (FEM) discretization for the macroscopic fluid dynamics equation with a deterministic variational particle scheme for the microscopic Fokker-Planck equation. To address challenges arising from micro-macro coupling, we employ a discrete energetic variational approach to derive a coarse-grained micro-macro model with a particle approximation first and then develop a particle-FEM discretization for the coarse-grained model. The accuracy of the proposed method is evaluated for a Hookean dumbbell model in a Couette flow by comparing the computed velocity field with existing analytical solutions. We also use our method to study nonlinear FENE dumbbell models in different scenarios, such as extensional flow, pure shear flow, and lid-driven cavity flow. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed deterministic particle approach can accurately capture the various key rheological phenomena in the original FENE model, including hysteresis and δ-function-like spike behavior in extensional flows, velocity overshoot phenomenon in pure shear flows, symmetries breaking, vortex center shifting, and vortices weakening in lid-driven cavity flows, with a small number of particles.