On the Arnold Stability of a Solid in a Plane Steady Flow of an Ideal Incompressible Fluid

We study the stability of a rigid body in a steady rotational flow of an inviscid incompressible fluid. We consider the two-dimensional problem: a body is an infinite cylinder with arbitrary cross section moving perpendicularly to its axis, a flow is two-dimensional, i.e., it does not depend on the coordinate along the axis of a cylinder; both body and fluid are in a two-dimensional bounded domain with an arbitrary smooth boundary. Arnold's method is exploited to obtain sufficient conditions for linear stability of an equilibrium of a body in a steady rotational flow. We first establish a new energy-type variational principle which is a natural generalization of the well-known Arnold's result (1965a, 1966) to the system “body + fluid.” Then, by Arnold's technique, a general sufficient condition for linear stability is obtained.