Very weak solutions and large uniqueness classes of stationary Navier-Stokes equations in bounded domains of \(\mathbb R^2\) (Q2498845)

The authors are concerned with the stationary Stokes and Navier-Stokes problem in a bounded domain of class \(C^{2,1}\) with not necessarily vanishing divergence of the velocity field and subject to non-homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Existence, uniqueness, and a priori estimates are shown for so-called very weak solutions \(u \in L^q\) with \(q>1\) for the linear Stokes and with \(q>2\) for the nonlinear Navier-Stokes problem. For the latter, a condition on the smallness of the data has to be assumed. Moreover, the data are supposed to fulfill rather weak assumptions relying on \(L^r\) with \(q/(q-1) < r \leq q\). The idea of the very weak formulation is to test with smooth divergence-free functions and to carry out integration by parts twice for the diffusion and once for the convective term. In the linear case, the proof relies upon an explicit representation of the solution as a sum of three functions that can be constructed from the three data of the problem (right-hand side, compressibility, and boundary value). In the nonlinear case, this representation becomes implicit, and Banach's fixed point theorem is invoked. The authors also study some consequences, e.g.\ a condition for the uniqueness of weak solutions \(u\in W^{1,2}\) to the Navier-Stokes problem that is weaker than the usual one and thus leads to a larger uniqueness class. Furthermore, a result showing regularity \(u\in W^{1,q}\) is provided.