On the reconstruction of obstacles and of rigid bodies immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid

Abstract

Abstract We consider the geometrical inverse problem consisting in recovering an unknown obstacle in a viscous incompressible fluid by measurements of the Cauchy force on the exterior boundary. We deal with the case where the fluid equations are the nonstationary Stokes system and using the enclosure method, we can recover the convex hull of the obstacle and the distance from a point to the obstacle. With the same method, we can obtain the same result in the case of a linear fluid-structure system composed by a rigid body and a viscous incompressible fluid. We also tackle the corresponding nonlinear systems: the Navier–Stokes system and a fluid-structure system with free boundary. Using complex spherical waves, we obtain some partial information on the distance from a point to the obstacle.