Special Session 99: Emerging Trends in Analysis and Control of PDEs

Steady Self-Propelled Motion of a Rigid Body in a Viscous Fluid with Navier-Slip Boundary Conditions
Arnab Roy
Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM)
Spain
Co-Author(s):    S\`arka Ne\v casov\`a and Ana Leonor Silvestre
Abstract:
In this talk, we consider the steady self-propelled motion of a rigid body immersed in a three-dimensional incompressible viscous fluid governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. Under suitable smallness assumptions on the boundary flux and on the normal component of the prescribed surface velocity, we establish the existence of weak steady solutions to the coupled fluid-structure system. Beyond existence, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which a prescribed slip velocity on the body surface induces nontrivial translational or rotational motion of the rigid body. This is achieved through the introduction of a finite-dimensional control thrust space, defined via auxiliary exterior Stokes problems with Navier boundary conditions, which captures the effective contribution of boundary-driven flows to the rigid-body motion. Our results clarify how boundary effects generate propulsion and extend the classical Dirichlet-based theory to the Navier-slip setting.