Homogenization of a coupled system with periodic oscillating coefficients (Q464364)

The authors describe a homogenization result for a system coupling a non stationary Navier-Stokes equation \[ \frac{\partial u^{\varepsilon }}{\partial t}-\mu \operatorname{div}\biggl(\mathcal{A}\biggl(\frac{x}{\varepsilon }\biggr)\nabla u^{\varepsilon }\biggr)+(u^{\varepsilon }\cdot \nabla )u^{\varepsilon }+\nabla p^{\varepsilon }=\alpha \theta ^{\varepsilon }e_{n}, \] in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\), where \( \Omega \) is an open and bounded subset of \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), \(n=2,3\), and a nonlinear diffusive equation \[ \frac{\partial \theta ^{\varepsilon }}{ \partial t}-\kappa \operatorname{div}\biggl(c\biggl(\frac{x}{\varepsilon }\biggr)\nabla \theta ^{\varepsilon }\biggr)+u^{\varepsilon }\nabla \theta ^{\varepsilon }=u^{\varepsilon }\cdot e_{n}. \] Here \(u^{\varepsilon }\) denotes the velocity of the fluid, \(p^{\varepsilon }\) its pressure, \(\theta ^{\varepsilon }\) its temperature and \(e_{n}=(0,0,\dots,1)\). The matrix \( \mathcal{A}(x)\) is symmetric and positive-definite and satisfies classical uniform coercivity and continuity properties. It is supposed to be periodic together with the coefficient \(c\), which is a smooth and positive function uniformly bounded from above and from below by positive constants. The incompressibility condition is added. Homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions and initial data are imposed for \(u^{\varepsilon }\) and \(\theta ^{\varepsilon }\). The authors first introduce a variational formulation of this problem which leads to the notion of weak solution. The main result of the paper describes the asymptotic behavior of the unique weak solution \( (u^{\varepsilon },p^{\varepsilon },\theta ^{\varepsilon })\) to this problem. The limit problem is of the kind but is involves constant matrix and coefficient, whose expressions are given in terms of the solution of cell problems. For the proof, the authors essentially use compensated compactness and unfolding tools.