Existence and regularity of steady flows for shear-thinning liquids in exterior two-dimensional domains. (Q717476)

The author considers a steady flow of an incompressible viscous liquid in dimension 2. Denoting by \(v(x)\) the velocity and by \(\pi (x)\) the density of the liquid, he considers the following system of equations: \[ -\nabla\cdot (\mu{\mathcal D}v)+v\cdot\nabla v+\nabla\pi =f ,\;\;\nabla\cdot v=0. \] If the viscosity coefficient \(\mu\) is a conatant, this is incompressible Navier-Stokes equation. He considers the following boundary problem: \[ v|_{\partial\Omega}=0, \lim_{|x|\to\infty}v(x)=v_{\infty}. \] Here \(\Omega\) is the complement of a compact set in \({\mathbb R}^2\) , and \(v_{\infty}\) is a constant vector. It is known that one can always solve a similar problem in \({\mathbb R}^3\). Unfortunately, one can solve this two-dimensional problem only when \(f\) and \(v_{\infty}\) are not too large, to this day. It is known that if one assumes that the viscosity coefficient \(\mu\) is not a constant but is depending on the stretching tensor \({\mathcal D}v=(\nabla v+{}^t (\nabla v))/2\) of \(v\), one can remedy this drawback. This means that one can solve the corresponding problem for arbitrary sizes of \(f\) and \(v_{\infty}\), in a restricted class of Sobolev spaces. This is called a shear-thinning model, and the author shows an existence result in a general class of Sobolev spaces. In an erratum it was pointed out that the last word of the original title (domains) was missing.