Relaxed solutions for incompressible inviscid flows: a variational and gravitational approximation to the initial value problem

Abstract

Following Arnold’s geometric interpretation, the Euler equations of an incompressible fluid moving in a domain D are known to be the optimality equation of the minimizing geodesic problem along the group of orientation and volume preserving diffeomorphisms of D . This problem admits a well-established convex relaxation that generates a set of ‘relaxed’, ‘multi-stream’, version of the Euler equations. However, it is unclear that such relaxed equations are appropriate for the initial value problem and the theory of turbulence, due to their lack of well-posedness for most initial data. As an attempt to get a more relevant set of relaxed Euler equations, we address the multi-stream pressure-less gravitational Euler–Poisson system as an approximate model, for which we show that the initial value problem can be stated as a concave maximization problem from which we can at least recover a large class of smooth solutions for short enough times. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Scaling the turbulence edifice (part 2)’.