The inviscid, compressible and rotational, 2D isotropic Burgers and pressureless Euler–Coriolis fluids: Solvable models with illustrations

Abstract

The coupling between dilatation and vorticity, two coexisting and fundamental processes in fluid dynamics [1, pp. 3, 6] is investigated here, in the simplest cases of inviscid 2D isotropic Burgers and pressureless Euler-Coriolis fluids respectively modeled by single vortices confined in compressible, local, inertial and global, rotating, environments. The field equations are established, inductively, starting from the equations of the characteristics solved with an initial Helmholtz decomposition of the velocity fields namely a vorticity free and a divergence free part [1, Sects. 2.3.2, 2.3.3] and, deductively, by means of a canonical Hamiltonian Clebsch like formalism [2], [3], implying two pairs of conjugate variables. Two vector valued fields are constants of the motion: the velocity field in the Burgers case and the momentum field per unit mass in the Euler-Coriolis one. Taking advantage of this property, a class of solutions for the mass densities of the fluids is given by the Jacobian of their sum with respect to the actual coordinates. Implementation of the isotropy hypothesis entails a radial dependence of the velocity potentials and of the stream functions associated to the compressible and to the rotational part of the fluids and results in the cancellation of the dilatation-rotational cross terms in the Jacobian. A simple expression is obtained for all the radially symmetric Jacobians occurring in the theory. Representative examples of regular and singular solutions are shown and the competition between dilatation and vorticity is illustrated. Inspired by thermodynamical, mean field theoretical analogies, a genuine variational formula is proposed which yields unique measure solutions for the radially symmetric fluid densities investigated. We stress that this variational formula, unlike the Hopf-Lax formula, enables us to treat systems which are both compressible and rotational. Moreover in the one-dimensional case, we show for an interesting application that both variational formulas are equivalent.