Semigroup well-posedness of a linearized, compressible fluid with an elastic boundary

Abstract

We address semigroup well-posedness of the fluid-structure interaction of a linearized compressible, viscous fluid and an elastic plate (in the absence of rotational inertia). Unlike existing work in the literature, we linearize the compressible Navier-Stokes equations about an arbitrary state (assuming the fluid is barotropic), and so the fluid PDE component of the interaction will generally include a nontrivial ambient flow profile U. The appearance of this term introduces new challenges at the level of the stationary problem. In addition, the boundary of the fluid domain is unavoidably Lipschitz, and so the well-posedness argument takes into account the technical issues associated with obtaining necessary boundary trace and elliptic regularity estimates. Much of the previous work on flow-plate models was done via Galerkin-type constructions after obtaining good a priori estimates on solutions (specifically [18]-the work most pertinent to ours here); in contrast, we adopt here a Lumer-Phillips approach, with a view of associating solutions of the fluid-structure dynamics with a C₀-semigroup {eᴬᵗ}ₜ≥₀ on the natural finite energy space of initial data. So, given this approach, the major challenge in our work becomes establishing the maximality of the operator A that models the fluid-structure dynamics. In sum: our main result is semigroup well-posedness for the fully coupled fluid-structure dynamics, under the assumption that the ambient flow field U ∈ H3(O) has zero normal component trace on the boundary (a standard assumption with respect to the literature). In the final sections we address well-posedness of the system in the presence of the von Karman plate nonlinearity, as well as the stationary problem associated to the dynamics.