Lanterna Rally

Author: Edoardo Bocchi

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

This manuscript deals with compressible-incompressible transitions arising in partial differential equations of fluid mechanics. We investigate two problems: floating structures and rotating fluids. In the first problem, the introduction of a floating object into water waves enforces a constraint on the fluid and the governing equations turn out to have a compressible-incompressible structure. In the second problem, the motion of geophysical compressible fluids is affected by the Earth's rotation and the study of the high rotation limit shows that the velocity vector field tends to be horizontal and with an incompressibility constraint.Floating structures are a particular example of fluid-structure interaction, in which a partially immersed solid is floating at the fluid surface. This mathematical problem models the motion of wave energy converters in sea water. In particular, we focus on heaving buoys, usually implemented in the near-shore zone, where the shallow water asymptotic models describe accurately the motion of waves. We study the two-dimensional nonlinear shallow water equations in the axisymmetric configuration in the presence of a floating object with vertical side-walls moving only vertically. The assumptions on the solid permit to avoid the free boundary problem associated with the moving contact line between the air, the water and the solid. Hence, in the domain exterior to the solid the fluid equations can be written as an hyperbolic quasilinear initial boundary value problem. This couples with a nonlinear second order ODE derived from Newton's law for the free solid motion. Local in time well-posedness of the coupled system is shown provided some compatibility conditions are satisfied by the initial data in order to generate smooth solutions.Afterwards, we address a particular configuration of this fluid-structure interaction: the return to equilibrium. It consists in releasing a partially immersed solid body into a fluid initially at rest and letting it evolve towards its equilibrium position. A different hydrodynamical model is used. In the exterior domain the equations are linearized but the nonlinear effects are taken into account under the solid. The equation for the solid motion becomes a nonlinear second order integro-differential equation which rigorously justifies the Cummins equation, assumed by engineers to govern the motion of floating objects. Moreover, the equation derived improves the linear approach of Cummins by taking into account the nonlinear effects. The global existence and uniqueness of the solution is shown for small data using the conservation of the energy of the fluid-structure system.In the second part of the manuscript, highly rotating fluids are studied. This mathematical problem models the motion of geophysical flows at large scales affected by the Earth's rotation, such as massive oceanic and atmospheric currents. The motion is also influenced by the gravity, which causes a stratification of the density in compressible fluids. The rotation generates anisotropy in viscous flows and the vertical turbulent viscosity tends to zero in the high rotation limit. Our interest lies in this singular limit problem taking into account gravitational and compressible effects. We study the compressible anisotropic Navier-Stokes-Coriolis equations with gravitational force in the horizontal infinite slab with no-slip boundary condition. Both this condition and the Coriolis force cause the apparition of Ekman layers near the boundary. They are taken into account in the analysis by adding corrector terms which decay in the interior of the domain. In this work well-prepared initial data are considered. A stability result of global weak solutions is shown for power-type pressure laws. The limit dynamics is described by a two-dimensional viscous quasi-geostrophic equation with a damping term that accounts for the boundary layers.