Stability of electrokinetic Couette states in the Poisson--Nernst--Planck--Navier--Stokes system

Abstract

In this paper, we study a two-dimensional Poisson--Nernst--Planck--Navier--Stokes system in a periodic channel driven by wall motion and an imposed tangential electric field, with two ionic species that may have unequal diffusivities. At the electroneutral Couette state, a diffusivity-weighted ionic energy combines with the triangular structure of the linearized operator to yield exponential linear stability for fixed \((A,E_0)\) and all positive diffusivities. Small-data nonlinear exponential stability is then obtained on a complex interpolation space adapted to the graph domain of the generator by combining analytic-semigroup smoothing with quadratic estimates. For unequal diffusivities, the nonzero streamwise modes of the linearized ionic subsystem satisfy a bounded-channel enhanced-dissipation estimate at rate \(D_{\min}^{1/3}|A|^{2/3}\) under an explicit strong-shear condition. When \(D_+=D_-\), a Fourier-mode factorization separates the common Couette advection--diffusion operator from a contractive drift--reaction semigroup, so the same scalar mixing rate is retained without any smallness condition on the electrostatic coupling. We also construct an exact Poisson--Boltzmann/electroosmotic Couette family for prescribed wall potentials. For sufficiently small wall-potential amplitude, its linearized generator is a small graph-domain perturbation of the electroneutral generator, which yields linear and nonlinear exponential stability on the same interpolation scale.