Sedimentation of particles with very small inertia II: Derivation, Cauchy problem and hydrodynamic limit of the Vlasov-Stokes equation

Abstract

We consider the sedimentation of $N$ spherical particles with identical radii $R$ in a Stokes flow in $\mathbb R^3$. The particles satisfy a no-slip boundary condition and are subject to constant gravity. The dynamics of the particles is modeled by Newton's law but with very small particle inertia as $N$ tends to infinity and $R$ to $0$. In a mean-field scaling we show that the evolution of the $N$-particle system is well approximated by the Vlasov-Stokes equation. In contrast to the transport-Stokes equation considered in the first part of this series, \cite{HoferSchubert23}, the Vlasov-Stokes equation takes into account the (small) inertia. Therefore we obtain improved error estimates. We also improve previous results on the Cauchy problem for the Vlasov-Stokes equation and on its convergence to the transport-Stokes equation in the limit of vanishing inertia. The proofs are based on relative energy estimates. In particular, we show new stability estimates for the Vlasov-Stokes equation in the $2$-Wasserstein distance. By combining a Lagrangian approach with a study of the energy dissipation, we obtain uniform stability estimates for arbitrary small particle inertia. We show that a corresponding stability estimate continues to hold for the empirical particle density which formally solves the Vlasov-Stokes equation up to an error. To this end we exploit certain uniform control on the particle configuration thanks to results in the first part \cite{HoferSchubert23}.