Uniform Estimates for the Flow of a Viscous Incompressible Fluid down an Inclined Plane in the Thin Film Regime

Abstract

We consider a two-dimensional motion of a thin film flowing down an inclined plane under the influence of the gravity and the surface tension. In order to investigate the stability of such flow, it is hard to treat the Navier--Stokes equations directly, so that a thin film approximation is often used. It is an approximation obtained by the perturbation expansion with respect to the aspect ratio $\delta$ of the film under the thin film regime $\delta\ll1$. Our purpose is to give a mathematically rigorous justification of the thin film approximation by establishing an error estimate between the solution of the Navier--Stokes equations and those of approximate equations. To this end, in this paper we derive a uniform estimate for the solution of the Navier--Stokes equations with respect to $\delta$ under appropriate assumptions.