Hele-Shaw limit of chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes flows

Abstract

This paper investigates the connection between the chemotaxis--Navier--Stokes system with porous medium type nonlinear diffusion and the Hele--Shaw problem in $\mathbb{R}^d$ ($d\geq2$). First, we prove the global-in-time existence of weak solutions for the Cauchy problem of the chemotaxis-Navier-Stokes system with the general initial data, uniformly in the diffusion range $m\in [3,\infty)$. Then, we rigorously justify the Hele--Shaw limit for this system as $m\rightarrow\infty$, showing the convergence to a free boundary problem of Hele--Shaw type, where the bacterium (cell) diffusion is governed by the stiff pressure law. Moreover, the complementarity relation characterizing the limiting bacterium (cell) pressure via a degenerate elliptic equation is verified by a novel application of the Hele--Shaw framework.