A traceless variant of the Johnson-Segalman viscoelastic
model is presented. The viscoelastic extra stress tensor is de
composed into its traceless (deviatoric) and spherical parts, leading to a reformulation of the classical Johnson-Segalman model. The equivalente of the two models is established
comparing model predictions for simple test cases. The new model is validated using several 2D benchmark problems.The structure and behavior of the new model are discussed.