Vanishing viscosity limit for concentrated vortex rings

Abstract

We study the time evolution of a viscous incompressible fluid with axial symmetry without swirl, when the initial vorticity is very concentrated in $N$ disjoint rings. We show that in a suitable joint limit, in which both the thickness of the rings and the viscosity tend to zero, the vorticity remains concentrated in $N$ disjointed rings, each one of them performing a simple translation along the symmetry axis with constant speed.