Nonlocal viscous transport and the effect on fluid stress

We demonstrate that, in general, only for fluid flows in which the gradient of the strain rate is constant or zero can the classical Navier-Stokes equations with constant transport coefficients be considered exact. This is typical of two of the most common types of flow: Couette and Poiseuille. For more complicated flow fields in which the streaming velocity involves higher order nonlinear terms, the use of nonlocal constitutive equations gives an exact description of the flow. These constitutive equations involve nonlocal transport kernels. For momentum transport we demonstrate that nonlocality will be significant for any particular flow field if the even moments of the nonlocal viscosity kernel are non-negligible. This corresponds to the condition that the strain rate varies appreciably over the width of the kernel in real space. Such conditions are likely to be dominant for nanofluidic flows.