Existence and stability of global solutions to a regularized Oldroyd-B model in its vorticity formulation (Q2137842)

The authors construct solutions to a system of PDEs that governs the evolution of a homogeneous non-Newtonian fluid in a three-dimensional torus: the incompressible equation for the velocity/momentum coupled to the diffusive Oldroyd-B equation for the Cauchy stress tensor. The first equation is of parabolic nature while the second is hyperbolic in standard formulation. Note: the author also consider a parabolic ``diffusive'' version of the second equation with an additional (small) diffusion of the stress in comparison with the standard case. Also, the originality is to rewrite the initial equations, using Helmholtz decomposition for the incompressible velocity field. In the first part, the authors show the existence of a solution to the Cauchy problem for the ``diffusive'' Oldroyd-B system where the velocity has been regularized (by convolution with a smooth function) in all the nonlinear (transport) terms, see (2.5), and (2.12) for the vorticity formulation. The solution is global (it holds from \(t=0\) to any final time \(T>0\)) with all components in the Sobolev space \(H^2\) if the forcing satisfies (2.14), or in a more regular space if the forcing is more regular like (2.19): see Theorems 2.1 and 2.2. Note the \(L^2\) stability result (with respect to variations in the initial conditions): Proposition 3.2. In the second part, the same kind of solutions are construced for the non-diffusive Oldroyd-B system: see Theorems 2.3, 2.4, and 4.6. Convergence in \(L^2\) of the diffusive solutions to those without stress-diffusion is also proved in Theorem 5.1. Regularizations are keys to the proofs, to handle the three-dimensional case without stress diffusion in comparison with [\textit{P. Constantin} and \textit{M. Kliegl}, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 206, No. 3, 725--740 (2012; Zbl 1366.76006)] as well as periodic boundary conditions.