Conservation laws for incompressible fluids (Q1121087)

We consider an incompressible fluid model and look for the full set of independent conservation laws, without any restrictive assumption on the form of such laws. In this case no variational formulation, and thus none of the various forms of Noether's theorem, is available. That is why we adopt a direct approach and seek solutions to the vanishing of a 4- dimensional divergence. We find it convenient to solve the problem in the material description and, eventually, to rewrite the results in the spatial (Eulerian) one. As a result of our approach, the complete set of conserved vectors is given and, as a byproduct, a new infinite class of conservation laws is determined explicitly. This class extends to incompressible fluids a remarkable result discovered very recently for compressible fluids. Incidentally, the procedure elaborated in this paper is likely to work for more involved situations.