Nonlinear stability for 3-D plane Poiseuille flow in a finite channel

Abstract

In this paper, we study the nonlinear stability for the 3-D plane Poiseuille flow $(1-y^2,0,0)$ at high Reynolds number $Re$ in a finite channel $\mathbb{T}\times [-1,1]\times \mathbb{T}$ with non-slip boundary condition. We prove that if the initial velocity $v_0$ satisfies $\Vert v_0-(1-y^2,0,0){\Vert }_{H^4}\le c_{0}R{e}^{-\frac{7}{4}}$ for some $c_0>0$ independent of $Re$, then the solution of 3-D Naiver-Stokes equations is global in time and does not transit away from the plane Poiseuille flow. To our knowledge, this is the first nonlinear stability result for the 3-D plane Poiseuille flow and the transition threshold is accordant with the numerical result by Lundbladh et al. \cite{LHR}.

This revised version has fixed an error about the proof of the space-time estimates in section 4