Long Time Dynamics of Nonequilibrium Electroconvection

Abstract

The Nernst-Planck-Stokes (NPS) system models electroconvection of ions in a fluid. We consider the system, for two oppositely charged ionic species, on three dimensional bounded domains with Dirichlet boundary conditions for the ionic concentrations (modelling ion selectivity), Dirichlet boundary conditions for the electrical potential (modelling an applied potential), and no-slip boundary conditions for the fluid velocity. In this paper, we obtain quantitative bounds on solutions of the NPS system in the long time limit, which we use to prove 1) the existence of a compact global attractor with finite fractal (box-counting) dimension and 2) space-time averaged electroneutrality $\rho\approx 0$ in the singular limit of Debye length going to zero, $\epsilon\to 0$.