Instability of two-phase flows: A lower bound on the dimension of the global attractor of the Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes system (Q633727)

The authors investigate the stability properties of the model for the flow of a mixture of two viscous incompressible fluids in two- or three-dimensional channel-like domain consisting of the Navier-Stokes equations governing the fluid velocity coupled with the convective Cahn-Hilliard equations for the relative density of atoms of one of the fluids. It is proved the instability of certain stationary solutions for such a system endowed with periodic boundary conditions on elongated domains \((0, 2\pi/\alpha_0)\times (0, 2\pi)\) or \((0, 2\pi/\alpha_0)\times (0, 2\pi)\times (0, 2\pi/\beta_0)\) for a special class of periodic body forces, provided that \(\alpha_0\) and \(\beta_0\) are small enough. As corollary the lower bound for the Hausdorff dimension of the global attractor is obtained.