Local Well-Posedness for Free Boundary Problem of Viscous Incompressible Magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the motion of incompressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) with resistivity in a domain bounded by a free surface. An electromagnetic field generated by some currents in an external domain keeps an MHD flow in a bounded domain. On the free surface, free boundary conditions for MHD flow and transmission conditions for electromagnetic fields are imposed. We proved the local well-posedness in the general setting of domains from a mathematical point of view. The solutions are obtained in an anisotropic space Hp1((0,T),Hq1)∩Lp((0,T),Hq3) for the velocity field and in an anisotropic space Hp1((0,T),Lq)∩Lp((0,T),Hq2) for the magnetic fields with 2<p<∞, N<q<∞ and 2/p+N/q<1. To prove our main result, we used the Lp-Lq maximal regularity theorem for the Stokes equations with free boundary conditions and for the magnetic field equations with transmission conditions, which have been obtained by Frolova and the second author.