Local existence and uniqueness of strong solutions to the density-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes-Korteweg system (Q2674341)

The authors consider the motion of an incompressible, viscous and capillary fluid in a bounded domain \(\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^{3}\) with smooth boundary \(\partial \Omega \). The nonhomogeneous Navier-Stokes-Korteweg system is written as: \((\rho u)_{t}+\operatorname{div}(\rho u\otimes u)-\operatorname{div}(2\mu (\rho )d)+\nabla P+\operatorname{div}(k(\rho )\nabla \rho \otimes \nabla \rho )=0\), \(\rho _{t}+\operatorname{div}(\rho u)=0\), \(\operatorname{div}u=0\).\ Here \(u\) denotes the velocity, \(\rho \) the density, \(P\) the pressure of the fluid, \(d=\frac{1}{2}(\nabla u+\nabla u^{\intercal })\) the deformation tensor, \(\mu =\mu (\rho )\) and \(k=k(\rho )\) the viscosity and capillary coefficients, which satisfy \(\mu ,k\in C^{1}[0,+\infty )\), and \(0\leq \underline{\mu }<\mu \leq \overline{\mu }\) on \([0,+\infty )\). The initial data \(\rho \mid _{t=0}=\rho _{0}\) and \((\rho u)\mid _{t=0}=\rho _{0}u_{0}\) are imposed in \(\Omega \) and the boundary conditions \(u=0\) are imposed on \(\partial \Omega \times (0,T)\). The authors define the strong solution as a triple \((\rho ,u,P)\) of functions such that all the derivatives present in the above system are regular distributions, and the above system holds almost everywhere in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\). The main result of the paper proves that for any \(q\in (3,6]\), if the initial data \((\rho _{0},u_{0})\) satisfy \(0\leq \rho _{0}\in W^{2,q} \), \(u_{0}\in H_{0}^{1}\cap H^{2}\), there exists a time \(T^{\ast }\in (0,T]\), such that the problem has a unique strong solution \((\rho ,u,P)\) which satisfies some regularity properties. The authors first prove the existence and the regularity of a unique strong solution (\(\rho \in C([0,T];W^{2,r})\)) to the transport equation \(\rho _{t}+\operatorname{div}(\rho v)=0\), in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\), with the initial condition \(\rho \mid _{t=0}=\rho _{0}\), and they prove estimates on \(\rho (t)\) in the norms \(W^{1,q}\) and \(W^{2,r}\). They prove time-weighted estimates for smooth solutions in suitable higher norms. The authors finally prove the local existence and uniqueness of strong solutions to the above system, using a standard semi-discrete Galerkin method, which builds approximate solutions \(\rho ^{m}\in C^{1}([0,T);C^{2}(\Omega ))\), \(u^{m}\in C^{1}([0,T);X^{m})\) where \(X^{m}\) is a finite-dimensional subspace of \( X=\{\varphi \in H_{0}^{1}(\Omega )\cap H^{2}(\Omega )\mid \operatorname{div}\varphi =0\) in \( \Omega \}\). They prove uniform estimates on these approximate solutions which allow to pass to the limit.