Non-isothermal non-Newtonian flow problem with heat convection and Tresca's friction law

TL;DR

This paper studies a complex non-isothermal non-Newtonian fluid flow model with heat convection and Tresca's friction law, establishing existence of solutions for the coupled system involving p-Laplacian and heat equations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel existence proof for a coupled non-Newtonian flow and heat conduction problem with Tresca boundary conditions, handling the nonlinearities and coupling.

Findings

Existence of solutions for the coupled system is proven.

A fixed point technique is used for approximate problems.

Limit passage as coupling parameter tends to zero is established.

Abstract

We consider an incompressible non-isothermal fluid flow with non-linear slip boundary conditions governed by Tresca's friction law. We assume that the stress tensor is given as $\sigma = 2 \mu\bigl( \theta, u, | D(u) |) |D(u) |^{p-2} D(u) - \pi {\rm Id}$ where $\theta$ is the temperature, $\pi$ is the pressure, $u$ is the velocity and $D(u)$ is the strain rate tensor of the fluid while $p$ is a real parameter. The problem is thus given by the $p$-Laplacian Stokes system with subdifferential type boundary conditions coupled to a $L^1$ elliptic equation describing the heat conduction in the fluid. We establish first an existence result for a family of approximate coupled problems where the $L^1$ coupling term in the heat equation is replaced by a bounded one depending on a parameter $0<\delta <<1$, by using a fixed point technique. Then we pass to the limit as $\delta$ tends to zero and we prove the existence of a solution $(u, \pi, \theta)$ to our original coupled problem in Banach spaces depending on $p$ for any $p > 3/2$.