Large time behavior of the vorticity two-dimensional viscous flow and its application to vortex formation (Q1113744)

The authors study the large time behavior of solutions of the two- dimensional vorticity equation (*) \(\omega_ t-\nu \Delta \omega +(v\cdot \nabla)\omega =0\), \(v=K*\omega\) \((x\in {\mathbb{R}}^ 2\), \(t>0)\), where \(K(x)=(2\pi | x|^ 2)^{-1}(-x_ 2,x_ 1)\) for \(x=(x_ 1,x_ 2)\in {\mathbb{R}}^ 2\); the initial vorticity \(\omega_ 0\) is supposed to be a finite Radon measure on \({\mathbb{R}}^ 2.\) Provided that the Reynolds number \(R=\nu^{-1}\int | \omega_ 0| (dx)\) is sufficiently small and \(\int (1+| x|^ 2)| \omega_ 0| (dx)\) is finite, every smooth solution with constant total vorticity and satisfying certain decay estimates behaves asymptotically like a Gauss kernel; the latter is a special solution of (*) with a Dirac measure as initial vorticity. (The existence of such solutions follows from results of the first author, \textit{T. Miyakawa} and \textit{H. Osada} [Two-dimensional Navier-Stokes flow with measures as initial vorticity, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 104, No.3, 223-250 (1988)].) As an application, it is shown that the vorticity field of certain 3D viscous incompressible flows with 2D rotational part converges to an equilibrium state (known as Burgers' vortex) whenever the Reynolds number of the rotational part is sufficiently small.