  It is well known that the Poiseuille flow of a visco-elastic polymer fluid
between plates or through a tube is linearly stable in the zero Reynolds number
limit, although the stability is weak for large Weissenberg numbers. In this
paper we argue that recent experimental and theoretical work on the instability
of visco-elastic fluids in Taylor-Couette cells and numerical work on channel
flows suggest a scenario in which Poiseuille flow of visco-elastic polymer
fluids exhibits a nonlinear "subcritical" instability due to normal stress
effects, with a threshold which decreases for increasing Weissenberg number.
This proposal is confirmed by an explicit weakly nonlinear stability analysis
for Poiseuille flow of an UCM fluid. Our analysis yields explicit predictions
for the critical amplitude of velocity perturbations beyond which the flow is
nonlinearly unstable, and for the wavelength of the mode whose critical
amplitude is smallest. The nonlinear instability sets in quite abruptly at
Weissenberg numbers around 4 in the planar case and about 5.2 in the
cylindrical case, so that for Weissenberg numbers somewhat larger than these
values perturbations of the order of a few percent in the wall shear stress
suffice to make the flow unstable. We have suggested elsewhere that this
nonlinear instability could be an important intrinsic route to melt fracture
and that preliminary experiments are both qualitatively and quantitatively in
good agreement with these predictions.
