Analysis of a Cahn–Hilliard model for viscoelastoplastic two-phase flows

We study a Cahn--Hilliard two-phase model describing the flow of two viscoelastoplastic fluids, which arises in geodynamics. A phase-field variable indicates the proportional distribution of the two fluids in the mixture. The motion of the incompressible mixture is described in terms of the volume-averaged velocity. Besides a volume-averaged Stokes-like viscous contribution, the Cauchy stress tensor in the momentum balance contains an additional volume-averaged internal stress tensor to model the elastoplastic behavior. This internal stress has its own evolution law featuring the nonlinear Zaremba-Jaumann time-derivative and the subdifferential of a non-smooth plastic potential. The well-posedness of this system is studied in two cases: Based on a regularization by stress-diffusion we obtain the existence of Leray-Hopf-type weak solutions. In order to deduce existence results also in the absence of the regularization, we introduce the concept of dissipative solutions, which is based on an estimate for the relative energy. We discuss general properties of dissipative solutions and show their existence for the viscoelastoplastic two-phase model in the setting of stress-diffusion. By a limit passage in the relative energy inequality for vanishing stress-diffusion, we conclude an existence result for the non-regularized model.