Layer Potentials and Poisson Problems for the Nonsmooth Coefficient Brinkman System in Sobolev and Besov Spaces

Abstract

In this paper we obtain well-posedness results for Poisson problems with Dirichlet, Neumann, or mixed boundary conditions for the Brinkman system with measurable coefficients and data in $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev and Besov spaces in Lipschitz domains on a compact Riemannian manifold M of dimension $$m\ge 2$$ . For the mixed problem we refer to partially vanishing traces on Ahlfors regular sets. We exploit the continuity property of an operator related to the variational formulation of such a boundary value problem on complex interpolation scales of $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev spaces defined on M or on a Lipschitz domain of M, $$p\in (1,\infty )$$ , and the property that this operator is an isomorphism for $$p=2$$ . Then the stability of the quality of being isomorphism on complex interpolation scales leads to the extension of the well-posedness results of analyzed boundary value problems from $$p\!=\!2$$ to p in a neighborhood of 2. First, we focus on a variational approach that reduces boundary problems of transmission, Dirichlet and mixed type for the Brinkman system to equivalent mixed variational formulations with data in $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev and Besov spaces. For $$p=2$$ , such a mixed variational formulation is well-posed. The mixed variational formulation is further expressed in terms of a linear continuous operator on $$H^{1,q}\times L^q$$ -Sobolev spaces for any $$q\in (1,\infty )$$ , which is also invertible on the solution space corresponding to $$q=2$$ . Working on complex interpolation scales allows us to extend the invertibility of the operator for $$q=2$$ to a neighborhood of 2, and then to extend the well-posedness result to $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev spaces with p in a neighborhood of 2. Well-posedness results for the analyzed transmission problems allow us to define the layer potentials for the nonsmooth coefficient Brinkman system and to obtain their properties in $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev and Besov spaces. Then the solution of the Poisson problem of Dirichlet type is constructed explicitly in terms of such layer potentials. Finally, the Poisson problem of Neumann type is also analyzed and the corresponding well-posedness result in $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev and Besov spaces is also obtained. In addition, we determine the unique solution of the Neumann problem in the case $$p=2$$ , by using a layer potential approach. We extend the well-posedness results obtained in Kohr and Wendland (Boundary value problems for the Brinkman system with measurable coefficients in Lipschitz domains on compact Riemannian manifolds: a variational approach, 2018) for boundary problems for the nonsmooth coefficient Brinkman system in $$L^2$$ -based Sobolev spaces on Lipschitz domains in compact Riemannian manifolds to a more general setting of $$L^p$$ -based Sobolev and Besov spaces.