The geometry of barotropic flow

In this article we write the equations of barotropic compressible fluid mechanics as a geodesic equation on an infinite-dimensional manifold. The equations are given by \begin{align} u_t + \nabla_uu = -\frac{1}ρ \grad p \\ ρ_t + \diver{(ρu)} = 0, \end{align} where the fluid fills up a compact manifold $M$, $u$ is a time-dependent velocity field on $M$, and $ρ$ is the density, a positive function on $M$. The barotropic assumption is that the pressure $p$ is some given function of the density, although our methods also extend to certain more general isentropic flows. Our infinite-dimensional manifold is the product $\mathcal{D}(M)\times C^{\infty}(M,\mathbb{R})$. This is a group using the semidirect product (which is sometimes incorporated in other treatments), but the Riemannian metric we use is neither left- nor right-invariant. Hence our geodesic equation is \emph{not} an Euler-Arnold equation. We compute the sectional curvature and show that at least when $M=S^1$, the curvature is always nonnegative. We also establish some results on the Lagrangian linear stability of solutions of this system, for certain nonsteady solutions in one dimension and steady solutions in two dimensions.

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