This paper concerns the construction of traveling wave solutions to the free boundary incompressible Navier-Stokes system. We study a single layer of viscous fluid in a strip-like domain that is bounded below by a flat rigid surface and above by a moving surface. The fluid is acted upon by a bulk force and a surface stress that are stationary in a coordinate system moving parallel to the fluid bottom. We also assume that the fluid is subject to a uniform gravitational force that can be resolved into a sum of a vertical component and a component lying in the direction of the traveling wave velocity. This configuration arises, for instance, in the modeling of fluid flow down an inclined plane. We also study the effect of periodicity by allowing the fluid cross section to be periodic in various directions. The horizontal component of the gravitational field gives rise to stationary solutions that are pure shear flows, and we construct our solutions as perturbations of these by means of an implicit function argument. An essential component of our analysis is the development of some new functional analytic properties of a scale of anisotropic Sobolev spaces, including that these spaces are an algebra in the supercritical regime, which may be of independent interest.
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Traveling Wave Solutions to the Free Boundary Incompressible Navier‐Stokes Equations
Abstract In this paper we study a finite‐depth layer of viscous incompressible fluid in dimension , modeled by the Navier‐Stokes equations. The fluid is assumed to be bounded below by a flat rigid surface and above by a free, moving interface. A uniform gravitational field acts perpendicularly to the flat surface, and we consider the cases with and without surface tension acting on the free interface. In addition to these gravity‐capillary effects, we allow for a second force field in the bulk and an external stress tensor on the free interface, both of which are posited to be in traveling wave form, i.e., time‐independent when viewed in a coordinate system moving at a constant velocity parallel to the rigid lower boundary. We prove that, with surface tension in dimension and without surface tension in dimension , for every nontrivial traveling velocity there exists a nonempty open set of force and stress data that give rise to traveling wave solutions. While the existence of inviscid traveling waves is well‐known, to the best of our knowledge this is the first construction of viscous traveling wave solutions. Our proof involves a number of novel analytic ingredients, including: the study of an overdetermined Stokes problem and its underdetermined adjoint problem, a delicate asymptotic development of the symbol for a normal‐stress to normal‐Dirichlet map defined via the Stokes operator, a new scale of specialized anisotropic Sobolev spaces, and the study of a pseudodifferential operator that synthesizes the various operators acting on the free surface functions. © 2022 The Authors.Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematicspublished by Wiley Periodicals LLC.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1653161
- PAR ID:
- 10470423
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics
- Volume:
- 76
- Issue:
- 10
- ISSN:
- 0010-3640
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2474 to 2576
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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