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These lecture notes are a continuation of the 254A lecture notes from the previous quarter.
We consider the Euler equations for incompressible fluid flow on a Euclidean space ; we will label as the “Eulerian space” (or “Euclidean space”, or “physical space”) to distinguish it from the “Lagrangian space” (or “labels space”) that we will introduce shortly (but the reader is free to also ignore the or subscripts if he or she wishes). Elements of Eulerian space will be referred to by symbols such as , we use to denote Lebesgue measure on and we will use for the coordinates of , and use indices such as to index these coordinates (with the usual summation conventions), for instance denotes partial differentiation along the coordinate. (We use superscripts for coordinates instead of subscripts to be compatible with some differential geometry notation that we will use shortly; in particular, when using the summation notation, we will now be matching subscripts with superscripts for the pair of indices being summed.)
In Eulerian coordinates, the Euler equations read
where is the velocity field and is the pressure field. These are functions of time and on the spatial location variable . We will refer to the coordinates as Eulerian coordinates. However, if one reviews the physical derivation of the Euler equations from 254A Notes 0, before one takes the continuum limit, the fundamental unknowns were not the velocity field or the pressure field , but rather the trajectories , which can be thought of as a single function from the coordinates (where is a time and is an element of the label set ) to . The relationship between the trajectories and the velocity field was given by the informal relationship
We will refer to the coordinates as (discrete) Lagrangian coordinates for describing the fluid.
In view of this, it is natural to ask whether there is an alternate way to formulate the continuum limit of incompressible inviscid fluids, by using a continuous version of the Lagrangian coordinates, rather than Eulerian coordinates. This is indeed the case. Suppose for instance one has a smooth solution to the Euler equations on a spacetime slab in Eulerian coordinates; assume furthermore that the velocity field is uniformly bounded. We introduce another copy of , which we call Lagrangian space or labels space; we use symbols such as to refer to elements of this space, to denote Lebesgue measure on , and to refer to the coordinates of . We use indices such as to index these coordinates, thus for instance denotes partial differentiation along the coordinate. We will use summation conventions for both the Eulerian coordinates and the Lagrangian coordinates , with an index being summed if it appears as both a subscript and a superscript in the same term. While and are of course isomorphic, we will try to refrain from identifying them, except perhaps at the initial time in order to fix the initialisation of Lagrangian coordinates.
Given a smooth and bounded velocity field , define a trajectory map for this velocity to be any smooth map that obeys the ODE
in view of (2), this describes the trajectory (in ) of a particle labeled by an element of . From the Picard existence theorem and the hypothesis that is smooth and bounded, such a map exists and is unique as long as one specifies the initial location assigned to each label . Traditionally, one chooses the initial condition
for , so that we label each particle by its initial location at time ; we are also free to specify other initial conditions for the trajectory map if we please. Indeed, we have the freedom to “permute” the labels by an arbitrary diffeomorphism: if is a trajectory map, and is any diffeomorphism (a smooth map whose inverse exists and is also smooth), then the map is also a trajectory map, albeit one with different initial conditions .
Despite the popularity of the initial condition (4), we will try to keep conceptually separate the Eulerian space from the Lagrangian space , as they play different physical roles in the interpretation of the fluid; for instance, while the Euclidean metric is an important feature of Eulerian space , it is not a geometrically natural structure to use in Lagrangian space . We have the following more general version of Exercise 8 from 254A Notes 2:
Exercise 1 Let be smooth and bounded.
- If is a smooth map, show that there exists a unique smooth trajectory map with initial condition for all .
- Show that if is a diffeomorphism and , then the map is also a diffeomorphism.
Remark 2 The first of the Euler equations (1) can now be written in the form
which can be viewed as a continuous limit of Newton’s first law .
Call a diffeomorphism (oriented) volume preserving if one has the equation
for all , where the total differential is the matrix with entries for and , where are the components of . (If one wishes, one can also view as a linear transformation from the tangent space of Lagrangian space at to the tangent space of Eulerian space at .) Equivalently, is orientation preserving and one has a Jacobian-free change of variables formula
for all , which is in turn equivalent to having the same Lebesgue measure as for any measurable set .
The divergence-free condition then can be nicely expressed in terms of volume-preserving properties of the trajectory maps , in a manner which confirms the interpretation of this condition as an incompressibility condition on the fluid:
Lemma 3 Let be smooth and bounded, let be a volume-preserving diffeomorphism, and let be the trajectory map. Then the following are equivalent:
- on .
- is volume-preserving for all .
Proof: Since is orientation-preserving, we see from continuity that is also orientation-preserving. Suppose that is also volume-preserving, then for any we have the conservation law
for all . Differentiating in time using the chain rule and (3) we conclude that
for all , and hence by change of variables
which by integration by parts gives
for all and , so is divergence-free.
To prove the converse implication, it is convenient to introduce the labels map , defined by setting to be the inverse of the diffeomorphism , thus
for all . By the implicit function theorem, is smooth, and by differentiating the above equation in time using (3) we see that
where is the usual material derivative
acting on functions on . If is divergence-free, we have from integration by parts that
for any test function . In particular, for any , we can calculate
and hence
for any . Since is volume-preserving, so is , thus
Thus is volume-preserving, and hence is also.
Exercise 4 Let be a continuously differentiable map from the time interval to the general linear group of invertible matrices. Establish Jacobi’s formula
and use this and (6) to give an alternate proof of Lemma 3 that does not involve any integration in space.
Remark 5 One can view the use of Lagrangian coordinates as an extension of the method of characteristics. Indeed, from the chain rule we see that for any smooth function of Eulerian spacetime, one has
and hence any transport equation that in Eulerian coordinates takes the form
for smooth functions of Eulerian spacetime is equivalent to the ODE
where are the smooth functions of Lagrangian spacetime defined by
In this set of notes we recall some basic differential geometry notation, particularly with regards to pullbacks and Lie derivatives of differential forms and other tensor fields on manifolds such as and , and explore how the Euler equations look in this notation. Our discussion will be entirely formal in nature; we will assume that all functions have enough smoothness and decay at infinity to justify the relevant calculations. (It is possible to work rigorously in Lagrangian coordinates – see for instance the work of Ebin and Marsden – but we will not do so here.) As a general rule, Lagrangian coordinates tend to be somewhat less convenient to use than Eulerian coordinates for establishing the basic analytic properties of the Euler equations, such as local existence, uniqueness, and continuous dependence on the data; however, they are quite good at clarifying the more algebraic properties of these equations, such as conservation laws and the variational nature of the equations. It may well be that in the future we will be able to use the Lagrangian formalism more effectively on the analytic side of the subject also.
Remark 6 One can also write the Navier-Stokes equations in Lagrangian coordinates, but the equations are not expressed in a favourable form in these coordinates, as the Laplacian appearing in the viscosity term becomes replaced with a time-varying Laplace-Beltrami operator. As such, we will not discuss the Lagrangian coordinate formulation of Navier-Stokes here.
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