A capillarity problem for compressible liquids (Q1036217)

The authors consider the capillary problem for a class of compressible liquids in a tube with constant cross-section. It is shown that there exists a locally Lipschitz minimizer of the associated energy functional defined on the class of functions of bounded variations. More precisely, the authors consider a class of isothermal fluids, where the density is assumed to be linear in the pressure, see \textit{R. Finn} [Mem. Differ. Equ. Math. Phys. 33, 47--55 (2004; Zbl 1101.76050)] for this and other models. The proof of the existence and regularity result are mainly based on estimates for the liquid height in the tube. The paper contains also an interesting generalization of Stampacchia's iteration method (Lemma 3.1).