Global Existence and Aggregation of Chemotaxis-fluid Systems in Dimension Two

TL;DR

This paper proves the global existence of solutions for a chemotaxis-fluid PDE system in two-dimensional bounded domains with subcritical mass and constructs boundary spot equilibria for the critical case, advancing understanding of cell aggregation in fluid environments.

Contribution

It extends the analysis of chemotaxis-fluid systems to bounded domains with specific boundary conditions, establishing global solutions and equilibria in 2D, which was previously only studied in unbounded or periodic settings.

Findings

Global existence of solutions for subcritical mass

Construction of boundary spot equilibria at critical mass

Development of $W^{2,p}$ theory for 2D stationary Stokes system

Abstract

To describe the cellular self-aggregation phenomenon, some strongly coupled PDEs named as Keller-Segel (KS) and Patlak-Keller-Segel (PKS) systems were proposed in 1970s. Since KS and PKS systems possess relatively simple structures but admit rich dynamics, plenty of scholars have studied them and obtained many significant results. However, the cells in general direct their movement in liquid. As a consequence, it seems more realistic to consider the influence of ambient fluid flow on the chemotactic mechanism. Motivated by this, He et al. (SIAM J. Math. Anal., Vol. 53, No. 3, 2021) proposed a coupled Patlak-Keller-Segel-Navier-Stokes system that features the effect of the friction induced by the cells on the ambient fluid flow. In their pioneer work, the global existence of solutions of such system in 2D was established when the initial mass is strictly less than a threshold, which is referred to as the subcritical case. The last two authors and Zhou (Indiana Univ. Math. J., Vol. 72, No. 1, 2023) extended their result to the critical case. To our best knowledge, this system has only been studied in either the whole space or periodic domains. In this paper, we consider the chemotaxis-fluid system in two-dimensional bounded domains, in which the boundary conditions are Neumann conditions for the cell density and the chemical concentration, and the Navier slip boundary condition with zero friction for the fluid velocity. We prove that the solution of the system exists globally in time with the subcritical mass. Concerning the critical mass case, we construct the boundary spot equilibrium rigorously via the inner-outer gluing method. In particular, we develop the global $W^{2,p}$ theory for the 2D stationary Stokes system subject to Navier boundary conditions and further establish semigroup estimates of the nonstationary counterpart by analyzing the Stokes eigenvalue problem.