Well-posedness of F. John’s floating body problem for a fixed object

The goal of this paper is to prove the well-posedness of F. John’s floating body problem in the case of a fixed object and for unsteady waves, in horizontal dimension d=1 and with a possibly emerging bottom. This problem describes the interactions of waves with a partially immersed object using the linearized Bernoulli equations. The fluid domain \Omega therefore has corners where the object meets the free surface, which consists of various connected components. The energy space associated with this problem involves the space of traces on these different connected components of all functions in the Beppo-Levi space \dot{H}^{1}(\Omega) ; we characterize this space, exhibiting non-local effects linking the different connected components. We prove the well-posedness of the Laplace equation in corner domains, with mixed boundary conditions and Dirichlet data in this trace space, and study several properties of the associated Dirichlet–Neumann operator (self-adjointness, ellipticity properties, etc.). This trace space being only semi-normed, we cannot use standard semi-group theory to solve F. John’s problem: one has to choose a realization of the homogeneous space (i.e., choose an adequate representative in the equivalence class) we are working with. When the fluid domain is bounded, this realization is obtained by imposing a zero-mass condition; for unbounded fluid domains, we have to choose a space-time realization which can be interpreted as a particular choice of the Bernoulli constant. Well-posedness in the energy space is then proved. Conditions for higher order regularity in times are then derived, which yield some limited space regularity that can be improved through smallness assumption on the contact angles. We finally show that higher order regularity away from the contact points can be achieved through weighted estimates.