We consider instationary creeping flow of a viscous liquid drop with free boundary driven by surface tension. This yields a nonlocal surface motion law involving the solution of the Stokes equations with Neumann boundary conditions given by the curvature of the boundary. The surface motion law is locally reformulated as a fully nonlinear parabolic (pseudodifferential) equation on a smooth manifold. Using analytic expansions, invariance properties, and a priori estimates we give, under suitable presumptions, a short-time existence and uniqueness proof for the solution of this equation in Sobolev spaces of sufficiently high order. Moreover, it is shown that if the initial shape of the drop is near the ball then the evolution problem has a solution for all positive times which exponentially decays to the ball.
We prove a general regularity result for fully nonlinear, possibly nonlocal parabolic Cauchy problems under the assumption of maximal regularity for the linearized problem. We apply this result to show joint spatial and temporal analyticity of the moving boundary in the problem of Stokes flow driven by surface tension.
In the free boundary problem of Stokes flow driven by surface tension, we pass to the limit of small layer thickness. It is rigorously shown that in this limit the evolution is given by the well-known thin film equation. The main techniques are appropriate scaling and uniform energy estimates in Sobolev spaces of sufficiently high order, based on parabolicity.
This paper addresses short-time existence and uniqueness of a solution to the N-dimensional Rele-Shaw flow problem with surface tension as driving mechanism. Global existence in time and exponential decay of the solution near equilibrium are also proved. The results are obtained in Sobolev spaces H S with sufficiently large s. The main tools are perturbations of a fixed reference domain, linearization with respect to these perturbations, a quasilinearization argument based on a geometric invariance property, and a priori energy estimates.
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