Renewal process's guide to fractional Navier-Stokes equations

Abstract

The Navier-Stokes equations, which remain unsolved, are crucial equations in fluid mechanics. Discovering the solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations is one of the challenging Millennium problems. In 1900, Hilbert proposed a potential approach to tackle this problem by establishing the relationship between microscopic dynamics and the macroscopic continuum equations. The key bridge is the derivation of Boltzmann equation and the theory of probability. In this paper, we shall use the collision renewal process with arbitrarily distributed waiting times to derive the Boltzmann equation for the time evolution of the probability of the velocity and the displacement of the particle, based on which we prove that the renewal process with exponential collision waiting time is equivalent to the classical Navier-Stokes equations, and that with power-law waiting time is equivalent to the fractional Navier-Stokes equations. Since the collision renewal process with arbitrarily distributed waiting times is a random process and is easy to perform the stochastic simulations of trajectories to obtain the corresponding solution, we actually find a stochastic approach to solve the classical and fractional Navier-Stokes equations.