Local Well-Posedness and Incompressible Limit of the Free-Boundary Problem in Compressible Elastodynamics

Abstract

We consider the three dimensional free-boundary compressible elastodynamic system under the Rayleigh–Taylor sign condition. This describes the motion of an isentropic inviscid elastic medium with moving boundary. The deformation tensor is assumed to satisfy the neo-Hookean linear elasticity. The local well-posedness was proved by Trakhinin (J Differ Eq 264(3):1661–1715, 2018) by Nash–Moser iteration. In this paper, we give a new proof of the local well-posedness by the combination of classical energy method and hyperbolic approach. In the proof, we apply the tangential smoothing method to define the approximation system. The key observation is that the structure of the wave equation of pressure together with Christodoulou–Lindblad (Commun Pure Appl Math 53(12):1536–1602, 2000) elliptic estimates reduces the energy estimates to the control of tangentially-differentiated wave equations despite a potential loss of derivative in the source term. To the best of our knowledge, we first establish the nonlinear energy estimate without loss of regularity for free-boundary compressible elastodynamics. The energy estimate is also uniform in sound speed which yields the incompressible limit, that is, the solutions of the free-boundary compressible elastodynamic equations converge to the incompressible counterpart provided the convergence of initial datum. It is worth emphasizing that our method is completely applicable to compressible Euler equations. Our observation also shows that it is not necessary to include the full time derivatives in the boundary energy and analyze higher order wave equations as in Lindblad–Luo (Commun Pure Appl Math 71(7):1273–1333, 2018) and Luo (Ann. PDE 4(2):2506–2576, 2018) even if we require the energy is uniform in sound speed. Moreover, the enhanced regularity for compressible Euler equations obtained in Lindblad–Luo (Commun Pure Appl Math 71(7):1273–1333, 2018) and Luo (Ann. PDE 4(2):2506–2576, 2018) can still be recovered for a slightly compressible elastic medium by further delicate analysis of the Alinhac good unknowns, which is completely different from Euler equations.