Stability of Permanent Rotations and Long-Time Behavior of Inertial Motions of a Rigid Body with an Interior Liquid-Filled Cavity

Abstract

A rigid body, with an interior cavity entirely filled with a Navier-Stokes liquid, moves in absence of external torques relative to the center of mass of the coupled system body-liquid (inertial motions). The only steady-state motions allowed are then those where the system, as a whole rigid body, rotates uniformly around one of the central axes of inertia (permanent rotations). Objective of this article is twofold. On the one hand, we provide sufficient conditions for the asymptotic, exponential stability of permanent rotations, as well as for their instability. On the other hand, we study the asymptotic behavior of the generic motion in the class of weak solutions and show that there exists a time t0 after that all such solutions must decay exponentially fast to a permanent rotation. This result provides a full and rigorous explanation of Zhukovsky’s conjecture, and explains, likewise, other interesting phenomena that are observed in both lab and numerical experiments.