The 3-D Inviscid Limit Result under Slip Boundary Conditions. A Negative Answer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that solutions to Navier-Stokes equations with slip boundary conditions generally do not converge to Euler solutions as viscosity approaches zero, especially on curved boundaries like a sphere.

Contribution

It provides a counter-example showing non-convergence of Navier-Stokes solutions to Euler solutions under slip boundary conditions on curved domains.

Findings

Convergence fails near initial time for curved boundaries.

Convergence holds on flat boundary domains like half-space.

Boundary curvature impacts the inviscid limit behavior.

Abstract

We show that, in general, the solutions to the initial-boundary value problem for the Navier-Stokes equations under a widely adopted Navier-type slip boundary condition do not converge, as the viscosity goes to zero (in any arbitrarily small neighborhood of the initial time), to the solution of the Euler equations under the classical zero-flux boundary condition, and same smooth initial data. Convergence does not hold with respect to any space-topology which is sufficiently strong as to imply that the solution to the Euler equations inherits the complete slip type boundary condition (see the Theorem 1.2 below). In our counter-example $\Om$ is a sphere, and the initial data may be infinitely differentiable. The crucial point here is that the boundary is not flat. In fact (see [3]), if $\Om = \R^3_+,$ convergence holds in $C([0,T]; W^{k,p}(\R^3_+))$, for arbitrarily large $k$ and $p$. For this reason, the negative answer given here was not expected.