Unsteady non-Newtonian fluid flows with boundary conditions of friction type: the case of shear thinning fluids

TL;DR

This paper studies unsteady shear thinning non-Newtonian fluid flows with mixed boundary conditions, proving the existence of solutions using a vanishing viscosity approach, variational inequalities, and fixed point methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to analyze shear thinning fluids with complex boundary conditions, extending previous results to non-linear parabolic variational inequalities.

Findings

Existence of solutions for shear thinning fluid flows with mixed boundary conditions.

Application of vanishing viscosity technique to non-Newtonian flow problems.

Use of fixed point and compactness methods to establish solution existence.

Abstract

Following the previous part of our study on unsteady non-New\-to\-nian fluid flows with boundary conditions of friction type we consider in this paper the case of pseudo-plastic (shear thinning) fluids. The problem is described by a $p$-Laplacian non-stationary Stokes system with $p<2$ and we assume that the fluid is subjected to mixed boundary conditions, namely non-homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions on a part of the boundary and a slip fluid-solid interface law of friction type on another part of the boundary. Hence the fluid velocity should belong to a subspace of $L^p \bigl(0,T; (W^{1,p} (\Omega)^3) \bigr)$, where $\Omega$ is the flow domain and $T>0$, and satisfy a non-linear parabolic variational inequality. In order to solve this problem we introduce first a vanishing viscosity technique which allows us to consider an auxiliary problem formulated in $L^{p'} \bigl(0,T; (W^{1,p'} (\Omega)^3) \bigr)$ with $p' >2$ the conjugate number of $p$ and to use the existence results already established in \cite{BDP2}. Then we apply both compactness arguments and a fixed point method to prove the existence of a solution to our original fluid flow problem.