Global solutions for chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes system with Robin boundary conditions

Abstract

We consider a chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes system modelling cellular swimming in fluid drops where an exchange of oxygen between the drop and its environment is taken into account. This phenomenon results in an inhomogeneous Robin-type boundary condition. Moreover, the system is studied without the logistic growth of the bacteria population. We prove that in one or two dimensions, the system has a unique global classical solution, while the existence of a global weak solution is shown in three dimensions. In the latter case, we show that the energy is bounded uniformly in time. A key idea is to introduce and utilise a boundary energy to derive suitable a priori estimates. Moreover, we are able to remove the convexity assumption on the domain.