On the Global Well-Posedness and Decay of a Free Boundary Problem of the Navier–Stokes Equation in Unbounded Domains

Abstract

In this paper, we establish the unique existence and some decay properties of a global solution of a free boundary problem of the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations in Lp in time and Lq in space framework in a uniformly H∞2 domain Ω⊂RN for N≥4. We assume the unique solvability of the weak Dirichlet problem for the Poisson equation and the Lq-Lr estimates for the Stokes semigroup. The novelty of this paper is that we do not assume the compactness of the boundary, which is essentially used in the case of exterior domains proved by Shibata. The restriction N≥4 is required to deduce an estimate for the nonlinear term G(u) arising from divv=0. However, we establish the results in the half space R+N for N≥3 by reducing the linearized problem to the problem with G=0, where G is the right member corresponding to G(u).

Keywords

• free boundary problem
• Navier–Stokes equation
• global well-posedness
• general domain