Maximally dissipative solutions for incompressible fluid dynamics (Q2051374)

This very interesting paper is concerning a new type of solutions (for a general isothermal system): the maximally dissipative solutions. The dissipative solutions was first introduced by Pièrre-Louis Lions in the context of the Euler equations. A dissipative solution is not verifying the corresponding equation in the distributional sense anymore, but his distance to smooth test functions fulfilling the equation only approximately is measured in terms of the relative energy and relative dissipation. The new element of the present paper is to get an uniqueness property in this class of solutions, not depending on the space dimensions. A suitable convex structure is considered on the set of dissipative solutions, which allows a minimization problem. The maximally dissipative solution is the minimizer of a convex functional; this gives the uniqueness property. The author specify that ``The maximally dissipative solutions only coincide with weak solutions, as long as the weak solution is unique'' (see bottom page 2). Two important cases are considered in the last part: Navier-Stokes and Euler equations. The main mathematical tools are: Hölder's, Gagliardo-Nirenberg's, and Young's inequalities; Gronwall's Lemma; Galerkin's discretization approach (to prove the existence of dissipative solutions). A large list of classical and very recent papers in the topic is given.