Blowup criterion for viscous baratropic flows with vacuum states (Q621322)

The paper is concerning barotropic and not baratropic flow of a viscous compressible Navier-Stokes fluid. In some previous papers, the authors proved a blow-up criteria in terms of the norm of the velocity gradient of the velocity, but with a strong restriction involving shear and bulk viscosity coefficients. In the present paper this result is improved, by removing this restriction. A new blow-up criterion is given in terms of the deformation tensor. The key steps are some new estimates in \(L_2\) of both density and velocity gradients. The result is obtained by a new energy estimate which uses the effective stress tensor. The case of zero density (vacuum state) is also studied. A very interesting estimate of the velocity gradient, in terms of divergence and vorticity, is given in Lemma 2.3, by using Poincaré and Ehrling type inequalities.