A new regularity criterion for steady Navier-Stokes equations (Q1978205)

The paper studies the regularity of the steady Navier-Stokes equations in higher space dimensions (\(N\geq 5\)). It is a continuation of the series of papers, where the authors showed existence of regular solutions without restriction to the size of the data for the Dirichlet problem (\(N=5,6\)) and space periodic problem (\(5\leq N \leq 15\)), cf. \textit{J. Frehse} and \textit{M. Růžička} [Acta Appl. Math. 37, 53-66 (1994; Zbl 0814.35094); Math. Ann. 302, 699-717 (1995; Zbl 0861.35074); Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 128, 361-380 (1994; Zbl 0832.35108)]. However, since the weak solutions to the steady Navier-Stokes equations are not unique, it is not clear whether all weak solutions are regular. The authors improve the known regularity criterion (i.e. \(u \in W^{1,2}_{\text{loc}}(\Omega) \cap L^N_ {\text{loc}} (\Omega)\)) in the following way. For the homogeneous Dirichlet problem with \(f\) (the right-hand side) in \(L^\infty (\Omega)\) and \(u \in W^{1,2}_0(\Omega)\) the weak solution is regular (i.e. \(u \in W^{2,r}_{\text{loc}}(\Omega)\), \(p \in W^{1,r}_{\text{loc}}(\Omega)\), \(1<r<\infty \), arbitrary) if additionally \(u \in L^q(\Omega)\), \(q\geq 4\), \(q>\frac {N}{2}\). In the case of space periodic problem, it is suffcient to take \(q> \frac {N}{4}\) (instead of \(\frac {N}{2}\)) and indeed, the regularity is up to the boundary. The proof of these results is based, similarly as in the above-mentioned papers, on the investigations of the head pressure \(\frac {|u|^2}{2} + p\). The authors show certain regularity property of the head pressure and apply the regularity criteria obtained in the last above cited paper.