Inertial Momentum Dissipation for Viscosity Solutions of Euler Equations: External Flow Around a Smooth Body

Abstract

We study the local balance of momentum for weak solutions of incompressible Euler equations obtained from the zero-viscosity limit in the presence of solid boundaries, taking as an example flow around a finite, smooth body. We show that both viscous skin friction and wall pressure exist in the inviscid limit as distributions on the body surface. We define a nonlinear spatial flux of momentum toward the wall for the Euler solution, and show that wall friction and pressure are obtained from this momentum flux in the limit of vanishing distance to the wall, for the wall-parallel and wall-normal components, respectively. We show furthermore that the skin friction describing anomalous momentum transfer to the wall will vanish if velocity and pressure are bounded in a neighborhood of the wall and if also the essential supremum of wall-normal velocity within a small distance of the wall vanishes with this distance (a precise form of the vanishing wall-normal velocity condition). In the latter case, all of the limiting drag arises from pressure forces acting on the body and the pressure at the body surface can be obtained as the limit approaching the wall of the interior pressure for the Euler solution. As one application of this result, we show that Lighthill's theory of vorticity generation at the wall is valid for the Euler solutions obtained in the inviscid limit. Further, in a companion work, we show that the Josephson-Anderson relation for the drag, recently derived for strong Navier-Stokes solutions, is valid for weak Euler solutions obtained in their inviscid limit.