NUMERICAL RESEARCH ON THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL FIBER ORIENTATION DISTRIBUTION IN PLANAR SUSPENSION FLOWS

Abstract To describe flow-induced fiber orientation, the Fokker-Planck equation is widely applied in the processing of composites and fiber suspensions. The analytical solution only exists when the Péclet number is infinite. So developing a numerical method covering a full range of Péclet number is of great significance. To accurately solve the Fokker-Planck equation, a numerical scheme based on the finite volume method is developed. Using spherical symmetry, the boundary is discretized and formulated into a cyclic tridiagonal matrix which is further solved by the CTDMA algorithm. To examine...