On instability of a generic compressible two-fluid model in $\mathbb R^3$

Abstract

We are concerned with the instability of a generic compressible two-fluid model in the whole space $\mathbb{R}^3$, where the capillary pressure $f(\alpha^-\rho^-)=P^+-P^-\neq 0$ is taken into account. For the case that the capillary pressure is a strictly decreasing function near the equilibrium, namely, $f'(1)<0$, Evje-Wang-Wen established global stability of the constant equilibrium state for the three-dimensional Cauchy problem under some smallness assumptions. Recently, Wu-Yao-Zhang proved global stability of the constant equilibrium state for the case $P^+=P^-$ (corresponding to $f'(1)=0$). In this work, we investigate the instability of the constant equilibrium state for the case that the capillary pressure is a strictly increasing function near the equilibrium, namely, $f'(1)>0$. First, by employing Hodge decomposition technique and making detailed analysis of the Green's function for the corresponding linearized system, we construct solutions of the linearized problem that grow exponentially in time in the Sobolev space $H^k$, thus leading to a global instability result for the linearized problem. Moreover, with the help of the global linear instability result and a local existence theorem of classical solutions to the original nonlinear system, we can then show the instability of the nonlinear problem in the sense of Hadamard by making a delicate analysis on the properties of the semigroup. Therefore, our result shows that for the case $f'(1)>0$, the constant equilibrium state of the two-fluid model is linearly globally unstable and nonlinearly locally unstable in the sense of Hadamard, which is in contrast to the cases $f'(1)<0$ and $P^+=P^-$ (corresponding to $f'(1)=0$) where the constant equilibrium state of the two--fluid model is nonlinearly globally stable.