Homogenization of the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations with prescribed flux rate or pressure drop in a perforated pipe

Abstract

The steady motion of a viscous incompressible fluid in a pipe (perforated with a large number of small holes) is modeled through the Navier-Stokes equations with mixed boundary conditions involving the Bernoulli pressure and the tangential velocity on the inlet and outlet of the tube, while either the transversal flux rate or the pressure drop is prescribed along the pipe. Applying the classical energy method in homogenization theory, we study the asymptotic behavior of the solutions to these systems, without any restriction on the magnitude of the data, as the size of the perforations goes to zero and show that the effective equations remain unmodified in the limit. The main novelty of the present work lies in the obtainment of the required uniform bounds, which are achieved (in the case of the prescribed flux problem) by a contradiction argument based on Bernoulli's law for solutions of the stationary Euler equations.