Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes systems near equilibrium

Abstract: The Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes system models electrodiffusion of ions in a fluid. We prove global existence of solutions in bounded domains in three dimensions with either blocking (no-flux) or uniform selective (special Dirichlet) boundary conditions for ion concentrations. The global existence of strong solutions is established for initial conditions that are sufficiently small perturbations of steady state solutions. The solutions remain close to equilibrium in strong norms. The main two steps of the proof are (1) the decay of the sum of relative entropies (Kullback-Leibler divergences) and (2) the control of $L^2$ norms of deviations by the sum of relative entropies.