Non-isothermal spherical Couette flow of Oldroyd-B fluid

The present paper is concerned with non-isothermal spherical Couette flow of Oldroyd-B fluid in the annular region between two concentric spheres. The inner sphere rotates with a constant angular velocity while the outer sphere is kept at rest. The viscoelasticity of the fluid is assumed to dominate the inertia such that the latter can be neglected in the momentum and energy equations. An approximate analytical solution is obtained through the expansion of the dynamical variable fields in power series of Nahme number. Non-homogeneous, harmonic for axial- velocity and temperature equations and biharmonic for stream function equations, have been solved up to second order approximation. In comparison of the present work with isothermal case; [1,2], two additional terms; a first order velocity and a second order stream function are stem as a result of the interaction between the fluid viscoelasticity and temperature profile. These contributions prove to be the most important results for rheology in this work.