Boundary Layers Associated with Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations: The Noncharacteristic Boundary Case

The goal of this article is to study the boundary layer of wall bounded flows in a channel at small viscosity when the boundaries are uniformly noncharacteristic, i.e., there is injection and/or suction everywhere at the boundary. Following earlier work on the boundary layer for linearized Navier-Stokes equations in the case where the boundaries are characteristic (no-slip at the boundary and non-permeable), we consider here the case where the boundary is permeable and thus noncharacteristic. The form of the boundary layer and convergence results are derived in two cases: linearized equation and full nonlinear equations. We prove that there exists a boundary layer at the outlet (downwind) of the form e^−Uz/ε where U is the speed of injection/suction at the boundary, z is the distance to the outlet of the channel, and ε is the kinematic viscosity. We improve an earlier result of S. N. Alekseenko (1994, Siberian Math. J.35, No. 2, 209-230) where the convergence in L² of the solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations to that of the Euler equations at vanishing viscosity was established. In the two dimensional case we are able to derive the physically relevant uniform in space (L^∞ norm) estimates of the boundary layer. The uniform in space estimate is derived by properly developing our previous idea of better control on the tangential derivative and the use of an anisotropic Sobolev imbedding. To the best of our knowledge this is the first rigorously proved result concerning boundary layers for the full (nonlinear) Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible fluids.