Three-dimensional flows of pore pressure-activated Bingham fluids

Abstract

We are concerned with a system of partial differential equations (PDEs) describing internal flows of homogeneous incompressible fluids of Bingham type in which the value of activation (the so-called yield) stress depends on the internal pore pressure governed by an advection–diffusion equation. After providing the physical background of the considered model, paying attention to the assumptions involved in its derivation, we focus on the PDE analysis of the initial and boundary value problems. We give several equivalent descriptions for the considered class of fluids of Bingham type. In particular, we exploit the possibility to write such a response as an implicit tensorial constitutive equation, involving the pore pressure, the deviatoric part of the Cauchy stress and the velocity gradient. Interestingly, this tensorial response can be characterized by two scalar constraints. We employ a similar approach to treat stick-slip boundary conditions. Within such a setting we prove long-time and large-data existence of weak solutions to the evolutionary problem in three dimensions.