Instability of Boundary Layers with the Navier Boundary Condition

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of 2D Navier-Stokes boundary layers with a viscosity-dependent Navier boundary condition, extending previous instability results across a range of boundary parameter values, and showing when boundary layer expansions fail.

Contribution

It generalizes the instability analysis of boundary layers for all values of the boundary parameter , revealing new regimes of instability and invalidating Prandtl expansions in certain cases.

Findings

Instability order varies with boundary parameter , from  to 0.

For   1/2, the boundary layer expansion is invalid.

The results unify and extend previous instability findings for different boundary conditions.

Abstract

We study the $L^{\infty}$ stability of the 2D Navier-Stokes equations with a viscosity-dependent Navier boundary condition around shear profiles which are linearly unstable for the Euler equation. The dependence from the viscosity is given in the Navier boundary condition as $\partial_y u = \nu^{-\gamma}u$ for some $\gamma\in\mathbb{R}$, where $u$ is the tangential velocity. With the no-slip boundary condition, which corresponds to the limit $\gamma \to +\infty$, a celebrated result from E. Grenier provides an instability of order $\nu^{1/4}$. M. Paddick proved the same result in the case $\gamma=1/2$, furthermore improving the instability to order one. In this paper, we extend these two results to all $\gamma \in \mathbb{R}$, obtaining an instability of order $\nu^{\theta}$, where $$\theta:=\begin{cases} \frac{1}{4} &\text{if } \gamma \geq \frac{3}{4};\\ \gamma - \frac{1}{2} &\text{if } \frac{1}{2}<\gamma < \frac{3}{4};\\ 0 &\text{if } \gamma \leq \frac{1}{2}. \end{cases}$$ When $\gamma \geq 1/2$, the result denies the validity of the Prandtl boundary layer expansion around the chosen shear profile.