Existence and Spatial Decay of Periodic Navier-Stokes Flows in Exterior Domains

A classical problem in the field of mathematical fluid mechanics is the flow of a viscous incompressible fluid past a rigid body. In his doctoral thesis, Thomas Walter Eiter investigates time-periodic solutions to the associated Navier-Stokes equations when the body performs a non-trivial translation. The first part of the thesis is concerned with the question of existence of time-periodic solutions in the case of a non-rotating and of a rotating obstacle. Based on an investigation of the corresponding Oseen linearizations, new existence results in suitable function spaces are established.

The second part deals with the study of spatially asymptotic properties of time-periodic solutions. For this purpose, time-periodic fundamental solutions to the Stokes and Oseen linearizations are introduced and investigated, and the concept of a time-periodic fundamental solution for the vorticity field is developed. With these results, new pointwise estimates of the velocity and the vorticity field associated to a time-periodic fluid flow are derived.