Polymer solutions can develop chaotic flows, even at low inertia. This purely elastic turbulence is well studied, but little is known about the transition to chaos. In two-dimensional (2D) channel flow and parallel shear flow, traveling wave solutions involving coherent structures are present for sufficiently large fluid elasticity. We numerically study 2D periodic parallel shear flow in viscoelastic fluids, and we show that these traveling waves become oscillatory and undergo a series of period-doubling bifurcations en-route to chaos.

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• Bifurcations
• Chaos
• Complex fluids
• Elastic waves
• Flow instability
• Low Reynolds number flows
• Non-Newtonian fluids
• Nonlinear dynamics in fluids
• Shear flows
• Transition to turbulence