Existence analysis for incompressible fluid model of electrically charged chemically reacting and heat conducting mixtures

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence of weak solutions for a comprehensive, thermodynamically consistent model of electrically charged, heat-conducting, chemically reacting non-Newtonian fluids, covering many cross effects and including the Newtonian case.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, thermodynamically consistent model that captures multiple cross effects and extends existence results to the Newtonian case without energy equality methods.

Findings

Established global weak solutions for the model

Covered a wide range of power-law parameters, including Newtonian fluids

Model incorporates multiple cross effects like Soret, Dufour, and Seebeck

Abstract

We deal with a three dimensional model based on the use of barycentric velocity that describes unsteady flows of a heat conducting electrically charged multicomponent chemically reacting non-Newtonian fluid. We show that under certain assumptions on data and the constitutive relations for such a fluid there exists a global in time and large data weak solution. The paper has two key novelties. The first one is that we present a model that is thermodynamically and mechanically consistent and that is able to describe the cross effects in a generality never considered before, i.e., we cover the so-called Soret effect, Dufour effect, Ohm law, Peltier effect, Joul heating, Thompson effect, Seebeck effect and also the generalized Fick law. The second key novelty is that contrary to the previous works on the similar topic, we do not need to deal with the energy equality method and therefore we are able to cover a large range of power-law parameters in the Cauchy-stress. In particular, we cover even the Newtonian case (which is the most used model), for which the existence analysis was missing.