The homogenized model of small oscillations of complex fluids (Q998854)

In this paper the authors consider a system of time dependent equations that describes small non-stationary motions of viscous incompressible fluid with a large number of small rigid interacting particles. All the system is supposed to depend on a (small) parameter \(\varepsilon\); in particular the sizes of the particles are supposed to be of order \(\varepsilon^3\) while the distance between the nearest particles is of order \(\varepsilon\). The author study the limit behaviour, as \(\varepsilon \to 0\), of the system, taking into account a variational formulation of the problem using the Laplace transform in time, and then they describe the solution of the stationary problem as a minimum problem of a functional \(\Phi_{\varepsilon}\). To study the limit behaviour they characterize a kind of \(\Gamma\)-limit of \(\Phi_{\varepsilon}\), where \(\Phi_{\varepsilon}\) depends on one variable, the limit \(\Phi_0\) on two. Given a family of mimimum points of \(\Phi_{\varepsilon}\), denote it by \(\{ v_{\varepsilon} \}\), the authors construct a family of piecewise linear splines \(\{ w_{\varepsilon}\}\) startign from \(\{ v_{\varepsilon}\}\) and they show that \((v_{\varepsilon}, w_{\varepsilon}) \to (v,w)\) in \(L^2(\Omega)^2\) where \((v,w)\) is a minimum point for \(\Phi_0\).