On Leray's problem in an infinitely long pipe with the Navier-slip boundary condition (Q6131287)

The authors consider a smooth domain \(\mathcal{D}\subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\) which is decomposed as \(\mathcal{D}=\mathcal{D}_{L}\cup \mathcal{D}_{M}\cup \mathcal{D}_{R}\), where \(\mathcal{D}_{L}\) and \(\mathcal{D}_{R}\) are semi-infinite smooth straight pipes with smooth and bounded cross sections \( \Sigma _{L}\) and \(\Sigma _{R}\) perpendicular to the \(x_{3}\)-axis: \(\mathcal{D }_{L}=\Sigma _{L}\times (-\infty ,-Z/2]\) and \(\mathcal{D}_{L}=\Sigma _{R}\times (Z/2,+\infty ]\). They consider the generalized Leray's problem, which consists to find a pair \((u,p)\) such that for a given flux \(\Phi \): \( u\nabla u+\nabla p-\Delta u=0\), \(\nabla \cdot u=0\), in \(\mathcal{D}\), where \( u\) is the displacement and \(p\) the pressure, and the Navier-slip boundary condition: \(2(\mathbb{S}u\cdot n)_{tan}+\alpha u_{tan}=0\), \(u\cdot n=0\), on \( \partial \mathcal{D}\), with \(\int_{\Sigma _{i}}u_{3}(x_{h},x_{3})dx_{h}=\Phi \) for \(\left\vert x_{3}\right\vert >Z/2\) and \(u\rightarrow g_{\Phi }^{i}\) as \(\left\vert x\right\vert \rightarrow \infty \) in \(\mathcal{D}_{i}\). Here \( \mathbb{S}u=\frac{1}{2}(\nabla u+\nabla ^{T}u)\) is the stress field, \(n\) the unit outer normal vector of \(\partial \mathcal{D}\), \(u_{tan}\) the tangential part of \(u\), \(\alpha >0\) the friction constant, and \(g_{\Phi }^{i}\) the Poiseuille flow associated with \(\Phi \). A vector \(u:\mathcal{D}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{3}\) is a weak solution to the generalized Leray's problem if \( u\in H_{loc}^{\sigma }(\mathcal{D})\), \(u\) satisfies \(2\int_{\mathcal{D}} \mathbb{S}u:\mathbb{S}\varphi dx+\alpha \int_{\partial \mathcal{D} }u_{tan}\cdot \varphi _{tan}dS+\int_{\mathcal{D}}u\cdot \nabla \varphi \cdot udx=0\) for all \(\varphi \in X=\{\varphi \in C_{c}^{\infty }(\mathcal{D}; \mathbb{R}^{3}):\nabla \cdot \varphi =0\), \(\varphi \cdot n\mid _{\partial \mathcal{D}}=0\}\), the flux condition in the trace sense, and \(u-g_{\Phi }^{i}\in H^{1}(\mathcal{D}_{i})\) for \(i=L,R\). The main results prove the existence of a positive constant \(\Phi _{0}\) depending only on \(\alpha \) and \(\mathcal{D}\) such that for any \(\Phi \leq \Phi _{0}\), the generalized Leray's problem has a weak solution \((u,p)\in H_{loc}^{\sigma }(\mathcal{D} )\times L^{2}(\mathcal{D})\) satisfying \(\sum_{i=L,R}\left\Vert u-g_{\Phi }^{i}\right\Vert _{H^{1}(\mathcal{D}_{i})}\leq C_{\alpha ,\mathcal{D}}\Phi \) , where \(C_{\alpha ,\mathcal{D}}\) depends only on \(\alpha \) and \(\mathcal{D}\) . This weak solution is unique if for any \(\zeta >Z\), \(\left\Vert \nabla u\right\Vert _{L^{2}(D_{\zeta })}=o(\zeta ^{3/2})\) and the flux \(\Phi \) is sufficiently small. If \(p\) is the pressure associated to the weak solution \(u \), which is unique up to the addition of an arbitrary constant, then \((u,p)\) belongs to \(C^{\infty }(\overline{\mathcal{D}})\) and \(u-g_{\Phi }^{i}\) satisfies pointwise decay estimates for large values of \(\left\vert x_{3}\right\vert \). For the proof, the authors first rewrite the Navier-slip boundary conditions on \(\partial \mathcal{D}\) in the locally moving coordinate framework. They prove a Poincaré inequality in a 2D compact domain with a \(C^{1}\) boundary, a partial Poincaré inequality in a straight pipe and a Poincaré-type inequality in a truncated and distorted pipe. They analyze the Poiseuille flows in the straight pipes \( \mathcal{D}_{L}\) and \(\mathcal{D}_{R}\). They build a smooth divergence-free vector \(a\), which satisfies the Navier-slip boundary condition and they prove estimates on this vector. They apply the Galerkin method and a Brouwer's fixed point theorem. The uniqueness and the decay estimates are proved using appropriate estimates on the solution.