Global existence and decay rates to self-consistent chemotaxis-fluid system

TL;DR

This paper proves global existence and decay rates for solutions to a complex chemotaxis-fluid system involving cell movement, chemotactic forces, and fluid dynamics, with new entropy inequalities and handling stronger nonlinear coupling.

Contribution

It introduces novel entropy functional inequalities and extends global well-posedness results to a more nonlinear chemotaxis-fluid model with potential forces.

Findings

Global existence of classical solutions in 2D and 3D under certain conditions.

Decay estimates for solutions with growth restrictions on potential.

Existence of global weak solutions in 3D chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes system.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a chemotaxis-fluid system involving both the effect of potential force on cells and the effect of chemotactic force on fluid: \begin{equation*} \left\{ \begin{split} \partial_t n + \mathbf{u}\cdot\nabla n & = \Delta n - \nabla\cdot\left(\chi(c)n\nabla c\right) + \nabla\cdot(n\nabla\phi), \\ \partial_t c + \mathbf{u}\cdot\nabla c &= \Delta c - nf(c), \\ \partial_t\mathbf{u} + \kappa(\mathbf{u}\cdot\nabla)\mathbf{u} + \nabla P & = \Delta\mathbf{u} - n\nabla\phi + \chi(c)n\nabla c, \\ \nabla\cdot\mathbf{u} &= 0 \end{split} \right. \end{equation*} in $\mathbb{R}^d\times(0,T)\, (d=2,3)$. One of the novelties and difficulties here is that the coupling in this model is stronger and more nonlinear than the most-studied chemotaxis-fluid model. We will first establish several extensibility criteria of classical solutions, which ensure us to extend the local solutions to global ones in the three dimensional chemotaxis-Stokes case and in the two dimensional chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes version under suitable smallness assumption on $\|c_0\|_{L^{\infty}}$ with the help of a new entropy functional inequality. Some further decay estimates are also obtained under some suitable growth restriction on the potential $\nabla \phi$ at infinity. As a byproduct of the entropy functional inequality, we also establish the global-in-time existence of weak solutions to the three dimensional chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes system. To the best of our knowledge, this seems to be the first work addressing the global well-posedness and decay property of solutions to the Cauchy problem of self-consistent chemotaxis-fluid system.