English

$L^\infty$ instability of Prandtl layers

Analysis of PDEs 2019-11-15 v2

Abstract

In 19041904, Prandtl introduced his famous boundary layer in order to describe the behavior of solutions of incompressible Navier Stokes equations near a boundary as the viscosity goes to 00. His Ansatz was that the solution of Navier Stokes equations can be described as a solution of Euler equations, plus a boundary layer corrector, plus a vanishing error term in LL^\infty in the inviscid limit. In this paper we prove that, for a class of smooth solutions of Navier Stokes equations, namely for shear layer profiles which are unstable for Rayleigh equations, this Ansatz is false if we consider solutions with Sobolev regularity, in strong contrast with the analytic case, pioneered by R.E. Caflisch and M. Sammartino \cite{SammartinoCaflisch1,SammartinoCaflisch2}. Meanwhile we address the classical problem of the nonlinear stability of shear layers near a boundary and prove that if a shear flow is spectrally unstable for Euler equations, then it is non linearly unstable for the Navier Stokes equations provided the viscosity is small enough.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.11024,
  title  = {$L^\infty$ instability of Prandtl layers},
  author = {Emmanuel Grenier and Toan T. Nguyen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.11024},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

revised version, removing order one forcing and including time-dependent boundary layers. Annals of PDE, to appear

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:08:43.671Z