On approximate solutions of the equations of incompressible magnetohydrodynamics

Inspired by an approach proposed previously for the incompressible Navier–Stokes (NS) equations, we present a general framework for the a posteriori analysis of the equations of incompressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) on a torus of arbitrary dimension d; this setting involves a Sobolev space of infinite order, made of C∞ vector fields (with vanishing divergence and mean) on the torus. Given any approximate solution of the MHD Cauchy problem, its a posteriori analysis with the method of the present work allows one to infer a lower bound on the time of existence of the exact solution, and to bound from above the Sobolev distance of any order between the exact and the approximate solution. In certain cases the above mentioned lower bound on the time of existence is found to be infinite, so one infers the global existence of the exact MHD solution. We present some applications of this general scheme; the most sophisticated one lives in dimension d = 3, with the ABC flow (perturbed magnetically) as an initial datum, and uses for the Cauchy problem a Galerkin approximate solution in 124 Fourier modes. We illustrate the conclusions arising in this case from the a posteriori analysis of the Galerkin approximant; these include the derivation of global existence of the exact MHD solution with the ABC datum, when the dimensionless viscosity and resistivity are equal and stay above a critical value.