Vectorial variational problems in L ^∞ constrained by the Navier–Stokes equations*

Abstract

We study a minimisation problem in L p and L ∞ for certain cost functionals, where the class of admissible mappings is constrained by the Navier–Stokes equations. Problems of this type are motivated by variational data assimilation for atmospheric flows arising in weather forecasting. Herein we establish the existence of PDE-constrained minimisers for all p, and also that L p minimisers converge to L ∞ minimisers as p → ∞. We further show that L p minimisers solve an Euler–Lagrange system. Finally, all special L ∞ minimisers constructed via approximation by L p minimisers are shown to solve a divergence PDE system involving measure coefficients, which is a divergence-form counterpart of the corresponding non-divergence Aronsson–Euler system.

Generalized second order vectorial ∞-eigenvalue problems

“…Higher order problems and problems involving constraints present additional difficulties and have been studied even more sparsely, see e.g. [3,4,9,10,[20][21][22][23][24]26]. In fact, this paper is an extension of [23] to the second order case, and generalizes part of the results corresponding to the existence of minimizers and the satisfaction of PDEs from [25].…”