Lagrangian controllability in perforated domains

Abstract

The question at stake in Lagrangian controllability is whether one can move a patch of fluid particles to a target location by means of remote action in a given time interval. In the last two decades, positive results have been obtained both for the incompressible Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. However, for the latter, the case where the fluid is contained within domains bounded by solid boundaries with the no-slip condition has not been addressed, with respect to the difficulty caused by viscous boundary layers. In this paper, we investigate the Lagrangian controllability of viscous incompressible fluid in perforated domains for which the fraction of volume occupied by the holes is sufficiently small. Moreover, we quantitatively distinguish situations depending on the parameters for holes (diameter and distance) and for fluid (size of the initial data). Our approach relies on recent results on homogenization for evolutionary problems and on weak-strong stability estimates in measure of flows, alongside classical results on Runge-type approximations for elliptic equations and on Cauchy-Kowalevsky-type theorems for equations with analytic coefficients. Here, homogenization refers to the vanishing viscosity limit outside a porous medium, where (after scaling in time) the Navier-Stokes equations are homogenized to the Euler or Darcy equations. Indeed, in the proof, we act on the Navier-Stokes equations by strong and fast forcing to leverage inviscid approximations, which is a standard technique in the theory of controllability.