ON THE SUFFICIENT CONDITION FOR THE LINEARIZED APPROXIMATION OF THE B$\"{E}$NARD CONVECTION PROBLEM

In various viscus flow problems it has been the custom to replace the convective derivative by the ordinary partial derivative in problems for which the data are small. In this paper we consider the Benard Convection problem with small data and compare the solution of this problem (assumed to exist) with that of the linearized system resulting from dropping the nonlinear terms in the expression for the convective derivative. The objective of the present work is to derive an estimate for the error introduced in neglecting the convective inertia terms. In fact, we derive an explicit bound for the L$_{2}$ error. Indeed, if the initial data are O(.epsilon.) where .epsilon. << 1, and the Rayleigh number is sufficiently small, we show that this error is bounded by the product of a term of O(.epsilon.$^{2}$) times a decaying exponential in time. The results of the present paper then give a justification for linearizing the Benard Convection problem. We remark that although our results are derived for classical solutions, extensions to appropriately defined weak solutions are obvious. Throughout this paper we will make use of a comma to denote partial differentiation and adopt the summation convention of summing over repeated indices (in a term of an expression) from one to three. As reference to work of continuous dependence on modelling and initial data, we mention the papers of Payne and Sather [8], Ames [2] Adelson [1], Bennett [3], Payne et al. [9], and Song [11,12,13,14]. Also, a similar analysis of a micropolar fluid problem backward in time (an ill-posed problem) was given by Payne and Straughan [10] and Payne [7].