Initial value problems for creeping flow of Maxwell fluids Original Research Article

We consider the flow of nonlinear Maxwell fluids in the unsteady quasistatic case, where the effect of inertia is neglected. We study the well-posedness of the resulting PDE initial-boundary value problem locally in time. This well-posedness depends on the unique solvability of an elliptic boundary value problem. We first present results for the 3D case with sufficiently small initial data and for a simple shear flow problem with arbitrary initial data; after that we extend our results to some 3D flow problems with large initial data. We solve our problem using an iteration between linear subproblems. The limit of the iteration provides the solution of our original problem.