SUMMARY

This work presents a computational methodology to study fiber dynamics in complex flows. Transport of fibrous matter in recent industrial applications involves a "complex fluid" as the suspending fluid. The rheology of such fluids is usually described by a non-Newtonian constitutive relation. In this work, the suspending fluid is assumed to be shear-thinning and is assumed to obey the Hershel-Bulkley constitutive relation. Fiber orientation information can be extracted by using a Fokker-Planck type equation once the velocity field is available. To this end, an open-source computational fluid dynamics library is employed to solve the governing equations where the equations are discretized on unstructured grids and solved using numerical schemes that are second order accurate in space and time.