Existence and Stability of Nonequilibrium Steady States of Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes Systems

Abstract: We consider the Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes system in a bounded domain of ${\mathbb {R}}^d$, $d=2,3$ with general nonequilibrium Dirichlet boundary conditions for the ionic concentrations. We prove the existence of smooth steady state solutions and present a sufficient condition in terms of only the boundary data that guarantees that these solutions have nonzero fluid velocity. We show that time evolving solutions are ultimately bounded uniformly, independently of their initial size. In addition, we consider one dimensional steady states with steady nonzero currents and show that they are globally nonlinearly stable as solutions in a three dimensional periodic strip, if the currents are sufficiently weak.