Anti-symmetric Hamiltonians (II): Variational resolutions for Navier-Stokes and other nonlinear evolutions

The nonlinear selfdual variational principle established in a preceeding paper [8] -- though good enough to be readily applicable in many stationary nonlinear partial differential equations -- did not however cover the case of nonlinear evolutions such as the Navier-Stokes equations. One of the reasons is the prohibitive coercivity condition that is not satisfied by the corresponding selfdual functional on the relevant path space. We show here that such a principle still hold for functionals of the form I(u)= \int_0^T \Big [ L (t, u(t),\dot {u}(t)+Λu(t)) +< Λu(t), u(t) > \Big ] dt +\ell (u(0)- u(T), \frac {u(T)+ u(0)}{2}) where $L$ (resp., $\ell$) is an anti-selfdual Lagrangian on state space (resp., boundary space), and $Λ$ is an appropriate nonlinear operator on path space. As a consequence, we provide a variational formulation and resolution to evolution equations involving nonlinear operators such as the Navier-Stokes equation (in dimensions 2 and 3) with various boundary conditions. In dimension 2, we recover the well known solutions for the corresponding initial-value problem as well as periodic and anti-periodic ones, while in dimension 3 we get Leray solutions for the initial-value problems, but also solutions satisfying $u(0)=αu(T)$ for any given $α$ in $(-1,1)$. Our approach is quite general and does apply to many other situations.

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