Well-posedness analysis of multicomponent incompressible flow models (Q2064543)

The authors consider a multicomponent diffusion problem in an incompressible fluid written as \(\partial _{t}\rho _{i}+div (\rho _{i}v+J^{i})=ri\) for \(i=1,\ldots ,N\), \(\partial _{t}(\varrho v)+div(v\otimes v-\mathbb{ S}(\nabla v))+\nabla p=\sum_{i=1}^{N}\rho _{i}b^{i}(x,t)\), and posed in a cylindrical domain \(Q_{T}=\Omega \times ]0,T[\), where \(T\) is a finite time and \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\) a bounded domain of class \(C^{2}\). Here \(\rho _{i}\), \(i=1,\ldots ,N\), are the partial mass densities of the species, \(\varrho =\sum_{i=1}^{N}\rho _{i}\) the total mass density, \(v\) the barycentric velocity of the fluid, \(p\) the thermodynamic pressure, \(\mathbb{S }(\nabla v)\) the viscous stress tensor, \(b_{i}\), \(i=1,\ldots ,N\), and the external body forces, \(J_{i}\), \(i=1,\ldots ,N\), the diffusions fluxes which satisfy \(\sum_{i=1}^{N}J_{i}=0\). The authors assume the condition \( J^{i}=-\sum_{j=1}^{N}M_{i,j}(\rho _{1},\ldots ,\rho _{N})(\nabla \mu _{j}-b^{j})\) for \(i=1,\ldots ,N\), where the Onsager matrix \(M(\rho _{1},\ldots ,\rho _{N})\) is a symmetric and positive semi-definite \(N\times N \) matrix which further satisfies \(\sum_{j=1}^{N}M_{i,j}(\rho _{1},\ldots ,\rho _{N})\) for every \((\rho _{1},\ldots ,\rho _{N})\in \mathbb{R}_{+}^{N}\) . The initial conditions \(\rho _{i}(x,0)=\rho _{i}^{0}(x)\) in \(\Omega \), \( i=1,\ldots ,N\), \(v_{j}(x,0)=v_{j}^{0}(x)\) in \(\Omega \), \(j=1,2,3\) are imposed together with the homogeneous boundary conditions \(v=0\), \(\nu \cdot J_{i}=0\) on \(\partial \Omega \times ]0,T[\), \(i=1,\ldots ,N\). The first main result of the paper proves the existence of \(T^{\ast }\in (0,T]\) such that the above problem has a unique solution \((\rho ,p,v)\in W_{s}^{1}(Q_{T^{\ast }};S_{\overline{V}})\times W_{s}^{1,0}(Q_{T^{\ast }})\times W_{s}^{2,1}(Q_{T^{\ast }};\mathbb{R}^{3})\), where \(s>3\) and \(S_{ \overline{V}}=\{\rho =(\rho _{1},\ldots ,\rho _{N})\in \mathbb{R} _{+}^{N}:\sum_{i=1}^{N}\overline{V}_{i}\rho _{i}=1\}\). The authors here assume different regularity properties on the data. They then improve this existence result under further hypotheses or restrictions on the data. For the proof, they reformulate the problem so that they can apply functional analytic methods and they introduce two ways to linearize the system and reformulate the initial-boundary-value problem as a fixed point problem in the state space. They prove estimates on the linearized problems.