Stability of critical shapes for the drag minimization problem in Stokes flow

Abstract

We study the stability of some critical (or equilibrium) shapes in the minimization problem of the energy dissipated by a fluid (i.e. the drag minimization problem) governed by the Stokes equations. We first compute the shape derivative up to the second order, then provide a sufficient condition for the shape Hessian of the energy functional to be coercive at a critical shape. Under this condition, the existence of such a local strict minimum is then proved using a precise upper bound for the variations of the second order shape derivative of the functional with respect to the coercivity and differentiability norms. Finally, for smooth domains, a lower bound of the variations of the drag is obtained in terms of the measure of the symmetric difference of domains.