On the global well-posedness and decay of a free boundary problem of the Navier-Stokes equation in unbounded domains

TL;DR

This paper proves the global existence, uniqueness, and decay of solutions to a free boundary Navier-Stokes problem in unbounded domains, extending previous results without boundary compactness assumptions.

Contribution

It establishes well-posedness and decay properties for a free boundary Navier-Stokes problem in unbounded domains without requiring boundary compactness, applicable in higher dimensions.

Findings

Global unique solutions exist and decay over time.

Results hold in unbounded domains with non-compact boundaries.

Applicable to half-space problems for dimensions N≥3.

Abstract

In this paper, we establish the unique existence and some decay properties of a global solution of a free boundary problem of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in $L_p$ in time and $L_q$ in space framework in a uniformly $H^2_\infty$ domain $\Omega\subset \BR^N$ for $N\geq4$. We assume the unique solvability of the weak Dirichlet problem for the Poisson equation and the $L_q$-$L_r$ estimates for the Stokes semigroup. The novelty of this paper is that we do not assume the compactness of the boundary, which is essentially used in the case of exterior domains proved by Shibata \cite{Shiba17CIME}. The restriction $N\geq 4$ is required to deduce an estimate for the nonlinear term $\bG(\bu)$ arising from $\divv\bv=0$. However, we establish the results in the half space $\hsp$ for $N\geq 3$ by reducing the linearized problem to the problem with $\bG=\fb0$, where $\bG$ is the right member corresponding to $\bG(\bu)$.