ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF INCOMPRESSIBLE FLUIDS AND A MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS OF THE EQUATIONS THAT GOVERN THEIR MOTION

In the first part of the paper we provide a new classification of incompressible fluids characterized by a continuous monotone relation between the velocity gradient and the Cauchy stress. The considered class includes Euler fluids, Navier-Stokes fluids, classical power-law fluids as well as stress power-law fluids, and their various generalizations including the fluids that we refer to as activated fluids, namely, fluids that behave as an Euler fluid prior activation and behave as a viscous fluid once activation takes place. We also present a classification concerning boundary conditions that are viewed as the constitutive relations on the boundary. In the second part of the paper, we develop a robust mathematical theory for activated Euler fluids associated with different types of the boundary conditions ranging from no-slip to free-slip and include Navier's slip as well as stick-slip. Both steady and unsteady flows of such fluids in three-dimensional domains are analyzed.