2019, Druet, Pierre-Étienne, Jüngel, Ansgar

The convective transport in a multicomponent isothermal compressible fluid subject to the mass continuity equations is considered. The velocity is proportional to the negative pressure gradient, according to Darcy?s law, and the pressure is defined by a state equation imposed by the volume extension of the mixture. These model assumptions lead to a parabolic-hyperbolic system for the mass densities. The global-in-time existence of classical and weak solutions is proved in a bounded domain with no-penetration boundary conditions. The idea is to decompose the system into a porous-medium-type equation for the volume extension and transport equations for the modified number fractions. The existence proof is based on parabolic regularity theory, the theory of renormalized solutions, and an approximation of the velocity field.

2019, Bothe, Dieter, Druet, Pierre-Étienne

We consider a system of partial differential equations describing mass transport in a multicomponent isothermal compressible fluid. The diffusion fluxes obey the Fick-Onsager or Maxwell- Stefan closure approach. Mechanical forces result into one single convective mixture velocity, the barycentric one, which obeys the Navier-Stokes equations. The thermodynamic pressure is defined by the Gibbs-Duhem equation. Chemical potentials and pressure are derived from a thermodynamic potential, the Helmholtz free energy, with a bulk density allowed to be a general convex function of the mass densities of the constituents. The resulting PDEs are of mixed parabolic-hyperbolic type. We prove two theoretical results concerning the well-posedness of the model in classes of strong solutions: 1. The solution always exists and is unique for short-times and 2. If the initial data are sufficiently near to an equilibrium solution, the well-posedness is valid on arbitrary large, but finite time intervals. Both results rely on a contraction principle valid for systems of mixed type that behave like the compressible Navier- Stokes equations. The linearised parabolic part of the operator possesses the self map property with respect to some closed ball in the state space, while being contractive in a lower order norm only. In this paper, we implement these ideas by means of precise a priori estimates in spaces of exact regularity.

2020, Bothe, Dieter, Druet, Pierre-Étienne

In this paper, we extend our study of mass transport in multicomponent isothermal fluids to the incompressible case. For a mixture, incompressibility is defined as the independence of average volume on pressure, and a weighted sum of the partial mass densities of the species stays constant. In this type of models, non solenoidal effects affect the velocity field in the Navier--Stokes equations and, due to different specific volumes of the species, the pressure remains connected to the densities by algebraic formula. By means of a change of variables in the transport problem, we equivalently reformulate the PDE system as to eliminate positivity and incompressibility constraints affecting the density, and prove two type of results: the local-in-time well-posedness in classes of strong solutions, and the global-in-time existence of solutions for initial data sufficiently close to a smooth equilibrium solution.

2019, Druet, Pierre-Étienne

We consider a system of partial differential equations describing diffusive and convective mass transport in a fluid mixture of N > 1 chemical species. A weighted sum of the partial mass densities of the chemical species is assumed to be constant, which expresses the incompressibility of the fluid, while accounting for different reference sizes of the involved molecules. This condition is different from the usual assumption of a constant total mass density, and it leads in particular to a non-solenoidal velocity field in the Navier-Stokes equations. In turn, the pressure gradient occurs in the diffusion fluxes, so that the PDE-system of mass transport equations and momentum balance is fully coupled. Another striking feature of such incompressible mixtures is the algebraic formula connecting the pressure and the densities, which can be exploited to prove a pressure bound in L1. In this paper, we consider incompressible initial states with bounded energy and show the global existence of weak solutions with defect measure.