Slip flows of Newtonian and viscoelastic fluids in a 4:1 contraction

•4:1 contraction flows of Newtonian and viscoelastic sPTT fluids under Navier slip.•For the Newtonian fluid, the corner vortex decreases with increasing slip.•For the sPTT fluid, slip promotes the appearance of a lip vortex.•The lip vortex grows and engulfs the corner vortex with increasing slip.•Slip enhances the effect of elasticity, leading to convergence difficulties. This work presents a numerical study of the 4:1 planar contraction flow of a viscoelastic fluid described by the simplified Phan-Thien–Tanner model under the influence of slip boundary conditions at the channel walls. The linear Navier slip law was considered with the dimensionless slip coefficient varying in the range [0;4500]. The simulations were carried out for a small constant Reynolds number of 0.04 and Deborah numbers (De) varying between 0 and 5. Convergence could not be achieved for higher values of the Deborah number, especially for large values of the slip coefficient, due to the large stress gradients near the singularity of the reentrant corner. Increasing the slip coefficient leads to the formation of two vortices, a corner and a lip vortex. The lip vortex grows with increasing slip until it absorbs the corner vortex, creating a single large vortex that continues to increase in size and intensity. In the range De=3–5 no lip vortex was formed. The flow is characterized in detail for De=1 as function of the slip coefficient, while for the remaining De only the main features are shown for specific values of the slip coefficient.