Traveling wave solutions to the free boundary incompressible Navier-Stokes equations

TL;DR

This paper establishes the existence of viscous traveling wave solutions for free boundary Navier-Stokes equations under gravity and surface tension effects, introducing novel analytical methods for such complex fluid dynamics problems.

Contribution

It is the first to construct viscous traveling wave solutions with free boundaries in the Navier-Stokes framework, employing innovative analytical techniques.

Findings

Existence of traveling wave solutions in viscous fluids with free boundaries.

Development of new analytical tools for free boundary Navier-Stokes problems.

Application of pseudodifferential operators and anisotropic Sobolev spaces.

Abstract

In this paper we study a finite-depth layer of viscous incompressible fluid in dimension $n \ge 2$, 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 $n \ge 2$ and without surface tension in dimension $n=2$, 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 over-determined Stokes problem and its under-determined adjoint, 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.