Vanishing viscosity and surface tension limits of incompressible viscous surface waves

Abstract

Consider the dynamics of a layer of viscous incompressible fluid under the influence of gravity. The upper boundary is a free boundary with the effect of surface tension taken into account, and the lower boundary is a fixed boundary on which the Navier-slip condition is imposed. It is proved that there is a uniform time interval on which the estimates independent of both viscosity and surface tension coefficients of the solution can be established. This then allows one to justify the vanishing viscosity and surface tension limits by the strong compactness argument. In the presence of surface tension, the main difficulty lies in the less regularity of the highest temporal derivative of the mean curvature of the free surface and the pressure. It seems hard to overcome this difficulty by using the vorticity in viscous boundary layers. One of the key observations here is to find that there is a crucial cancelation between the mean curvature and the pressure by using the dynamic boundary condition.