Well-Posedness of Solutions to Stochastic Fluid–Structure Interaction

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a constructive approach to study well-posedness of solutions to stochastic fluid–structure interaction with stochastic noise. We focus on a benchmark problem in stochastic fluid–structure interaction, and prove the existence of a unique weak solution in the probabilistically strong sense. The benchmark problem consists of the 2D time-dependent Stokes equations describing the flow of an incompressible, viscous fluid interacting with a linearly elastic membrane modeled by the 1D linear wave equation. The membrane is stochastically forced by the time-dependent white noise. The fluid and the structure are linearly coupled. The constructive existence proof is based on a time-discretization via an operator splitting approach. This introduces a sequence of approximate solutions, which are random variables. We show the existence of a subsequence of approximate solutions which converges, almost surely, to a weak solution in the probabilistically strong sense. The proof is based on uniform energy estimates in terms of the expectation of the energy norms, which are the backbone for a weak compactness argument giving rise to a weakly convergent subsequence of probability measures associated with the approximate solutions. Probabilistic techniques based on the Skorohod representation theorem and the Gyöngy–Krylov lemma are then employed to obtain almost sure convergence of a subsequence of the random approximate solutions to a weak solution in the probabilistically strong sense. The result shows that the deterministic benchmark FSI model is robust to stochastic noise, even in the presence of rough white noise in time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first well-posedness result for stochastic fluid–structure interaction.