Steady vortex flows of perturbation type in a planar bounded domain

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate steady Euler flows in a two-dimensional bounded domain. By an adaption of the vorticity method, we prove that for any nonconstant harmonic function $q$, which corresponds to a nontrivial irrotational flow, there exists a family of steady Euler flows with small circulation in which the vorticity is continuous and supported in a small neighborhood of the set of maximum points of $q$ near the boundary, and the corresponding stream function satisfies a semilinear elliptic equation with a given profile function. Moreover, if $q$ has $k$ isolated maximum points $\{{\bar{x}}_1,\cdot \cdot \cdot ,{\bar{x}}_k\}$ on the boundary, we show that there exists a family of steady Euler flows whose vorticity is continuous and supported in $k$ disjoint regions of small diameter, and each of them is contained in a small neighborhood of ${\bar{x}}_i$, and in each of these small regions the stream function satisfies a semilinear elliptic equation with a given profile function.

21 pages