Vector Fields of Cancellation for the Prandtl Operators

Abstract

It has been a fascinating topic in the study of boundary layer theory about the well-posedness of Prandtl equation that was derived in 1904. Recently, new ideas about cancellation to overcome the loss of tangential derivatives were obtained so that Prandtl equation can be shown to be well-posed in Sobolev spaces to avoid the use of Crocco transformation as in the classical work of Oleinik. This short note aims to show that the cancellation mechanism is in fact related to some intrinsic directional derivative that can be used to recover the tangential derivative under some structural assumption on the fluid near the boundary.