Problems of stability and the beginning of chaos in closed hydrodynamic flows (Q757206)

On the way to developed turbulence the basic, globally stable flow in bounded volumes with increase of the control parameters undergoes a number of reorganizations corresponding to bifurcations of the Navier- Stokes equations each of which usually leads to the appearance of a more complex flow regime. Several such reorganizations often suffice for the occurrence of the first stage of turbulence-chaos-a flow regime characterized by aperiodic behavior in time, but with a completely regular spatial structure. Such behavior of fluid flow with growth of the parameters has received some justification within the framework of finite-dimensional dynamical systems in general position. In this mathematical image of chaos in the phase space of the system there arise certain complicated attracting sets of relative small dimension - strange attractors on which the evolution of the system depends in a sensitive manner on the initial data. Application of the results of the theory of finite-dimensional dynamical systems to the description of fluid flows requires serious justifications, first, because the Navier-Stokes equations are infinite dimensional and, second, it is not clear whether their properties are ``typical''. The first step in this direction must be the proof of the existence and uniqueness of global solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. It is then necessary to show that attractors of the Navier-Stokes equations are finite dimensional and to obtain upper and lower bounds for the Hausdorff dimension of these attractors. The difficulty here is that rigorous results have been obtained only for two- dimensional flows in bounded regions with the condition of adherence or periodicity on the boundaries.