Well-posedness and sharp interface limit of a non-isothermal Navier--Stokes/Allen--Cahn model

TL;DR

This paper develops a thermodynamically consistent phase-field model for two viscous incompressible fluids, proves local and global well-posedness, and demonstrates convergence to a mean curvature flow under energy assumptions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-isothermal Navier--Stokes/Allen--Cahn model with a new weak formulation and proves its well-posedness and convergence properties.

Findings

Proved local-in-time strong solution existence.

Established global-in-time weak solution existence.

Showed convergence to mean curvature flow under energy conditions.

Abstract

We propose a thermodynamically consistent phase-field model for the flow of a mixture of two different viscous incompressible fluids of equal density in a bounded domain. We prove the well-posedness of local-in-time strong solutions by means of maximal regularity and contraction mapping arguments. We introduce a suitable entropic weak formulation of the problem, replacing the heat equation by the total energy inequality and an entropy production inequality, and we rigorously prove global-in-time existence of such weak solutions, developing a novel approximation scheme. We also show that an entropic weak solution to this non-isothermal phase-field model converges to a distributional (or $BV$) solution to a non-isothermal Navier--Stokes/mean curvature flow, under an energy convergence assumption.