Channel flows of shear-thinning fluids that mimic the mechanical response of a Bingham fluid

The linear stability of channel flows driven by pressure drops is carried out for fluids that exhibit a yield stress, the mechanical response of which is prescribed by the Bingham constitutive relation or two of its regularizations: the model due to Allouche and co-workers that is usually referred to as the “simple model”, and Papanastasiou model. Despite the fact that these two regularized models provide a good approximation of the steady Poiseuille flow of a Bingham fluid, they fail to predict the stability characteristics of the exact Bingham model. The critical thresholds for the onset of turbulence predicted by using the simple and Papanastasiou models are essentially the same, but they differ significantly from that of the exact Bingham model. This discrepancy is shown to be due to the absence of energy dissipation in the rigid core of a Bingham fluid.