Elongational Flows in Polymer Processing

The production of long, thin polymeric fibers is a main objective of the textile industry. Melt-spinning is a particularly simple and effective technique. In this work, we shall discuss the equations of melt-spinning in viscous and viscoelastic flow. These quasilinear hyperbolic equations model the uniaxial extension of a fluid thread before its solidification.

We will address the following topics: first we shall prove existence, uniqueness, and regularity of solutions. Our solution strategy will be developed in detail for the viscous case. For non-Newtonian and isothermal flows, we shall outline the general ideas. Our solution technique consists of energy estimates and fixed-point arguments in appropriate Banach spaces. The existence result for a simple transport equation is the key to understanding the quasilinear case. The second issue of this exposition will be the stability of the unforced frost line formation. We will give a rigorous justification that, in the viscous regime, the linearized equations obey the ``Principle of Linear Stability''. As a consequence, we are allowed to relate the stability of the associated strongly continuous semigroup to the numerical resolution of the spectrum of its generator. By using a spectral collocation method, we shall derive numerical results on the eigenvalue distribution, thereby confirming prior results on the stability of the steady-state solution.