Stability and optimal decay for a system of 3D anisotropic Boussinesq equations
Abstract This paper focuses on a system of three-dimensional (3D) Boussinesq equations modeling anisotropic buoyancy-driven fluids. The goal here is to solve the stability and large-time behavior problem on perturbations near the hydrostatic balance, a prominent equilibrium in fluid dynamics, atmospherics and astrophysics. Due to the lack of the vertical kinematic dissipation and the horizontal thermal diffusion, this stability problem is difficult. When the spatial domain is Ω = R 2 × T with T = [ − 1 / 2 , 1 / 2 ] being a 1D periodic box, this paper establishes the desired stability for fluids with certain symmetries. The approach here is to distinguish the vertical averages of the velocity and temperature from their corresponding oscillation parts. In addition, the oscillation parts are shown to decay exponentially to zero in time.
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Award ID(s):
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10322510
Journal Name:
Nonlinearity
Volume:
34
Issue:
8
ISSN:
0951-7715
1. The flow in a Hele-Shaw cell with a time-increasing gap poses a unique shrinking interface problem. When the upper plate of the cell is lifted perpendicularly at a prescribed speed, the exterior less viscous fluid penetrates the interior more viscous fluid, which generates complex, time-dependent interfacial patterns through the Saffman–Taylor instability. The pattern formation process sensitively depends on the lifting speed and is still not fully understood. For some lifting speeds, such as linear or exponential speed, the instability is transient and the interface eventually shrinks as a circle. However, linear stability analysis suggests there exist shape invariant shrinking patterns if the gap $b(t)$ is increased more rapidly: $b(t)=\left (1-({7}/{2})\tau \mathcal {C} t\right )^{-{2}/{7}}$ , where $\tau$ is the surface tension and $\mathcal {C}$ is a function of the interface perturbation mode $k$ . Here, we use a spectrally accurate boundary integral method together with an efficient time adaptive rescaling scheme, which for the first time makes it possible to explore the nonlinear limiting dynamical behaviour of a vanishing interface. When the gap is increased at a constant rate, our numerical results quantitatively agree with experimental observations (Nase et al. , Phys. Fluids , vol. 23, 2011, 123101). When wemore »