Stability of an oscillatory Taylor–Couette flow in an upper convected Maxwell fluid

The stability of pulsed bi-dimensional flow between two co-oscillating cylinders in a linear Maxwell fluid was studied by Riahi et al. [J. Soc. Rheol. 42, 321–327 (2014)]. In the present paper, we revisit this flow configuration with emphasis on the effect of the non-linear terms in the constitutive equation of the model, measured by the Weissenberg number, on the dynamics of the system. Under these assumptions and using the upper convected Maxwell derivative, we examine this model to large amplitude oscillatory shear giving rise to the appearance, in comparison to the linear Maxwell model, of the azimuthal normal stress in the basic state. Using the spectral method and the Floquet theory for the spatiotemporal resolution of the obtained eigenvalue problem, numerical results exhibit numerous classes of Taylor vortex flows depending on the order of magnitude of the fluid elasticity. The resulting stability diagram consists of several branches intersecting at specific frequencies where two different Taylor vortex flows simultaneously branch off from the basic state. This feature is accompanied by the occurrence of several co-dimension two bifurcation points besides jumps/drops in the corresponding critical wave number. In addition, it turns out that the elasticity produces strong destabilizing and stabilizing effects in the limit of high and low frequency regimes, respectively, attributed solely to the non-linearities considered by the rheological model.