Abstract. Here we prove the existence of global in time regular solutions to the twodimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations supplemented with arbitrary large initial velocity v0 and almost constant density ̺0 , for large volume (bulk) viscosity. The result is generalized to the higher dimensional case under the additional assumption that the strong solution of the classical incompressible Navier-Stokes equations supplemented with the divergence-free projection of v0, is global. The systems are examined in R d with d ≥ 2 , in the criticalḂ s 2,1 Besov spaces framework.
IntroductionWe are concerned with the following compressible Navier-Stokes equations in the whole space R d :supplemented with initial data: ̺| t=0 = ̺ 0 and v| t=0 = v 0 .The pressure function P is given and assumed to be strictly increasing. The shear and volume viscosity coefficients λ and µ are constant (just for simplicity) and fulfill the standard strong parabolicity assumption:(1.2) µ > 0 and ν := λ + 2µ > 0.Starting with the pioneering work by Matsumura and Nishida [18,19] in the beginning of the eighties, a number of papers have been dedicated to the challenging issue of proving the global existence of strong solutions for (1.1) in different contexts (whole space or domains, dimension d = 2 or d ≥ 3, and so on). One may mention in particular the works by Zajaczkowski [26], Shibata [13], Danchin [4], Mucha [21,23,24] and, more recently, by Kotschote [14,15]. The common point between all those papers is that the initial velocity is assumed to be small, and that the initial density is close to a stable constant steady state.Our main goal is to prove the global existence of strong solutions to (1.1) for a class of large initial data. In the two-dimensional case, we establish that, indeed, for fixed shear viscosity µ and any initial velocity-field v 0 (with critical regularity), the solution to (1.1) is global if λ is sufficiently large, and ̺ 0 sufficiently close (in terms of λ) to some positive constant (say 1 for notational simplicity). This result will strongly rely on the fact that, at least formally, the limit velocity for λ → +∞ satisfies the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations:with V 0 being the Leray-Helmholtz projection of v 0 on divergence-free vector-fields. Then the initial data V 0 of (1.3) is inḂ 0 2,1 (R 2 ). Therefore, in light of the well-known embeddingḂ 0 2,1 (R 2 ) ⊂ L 2 (R 2 ), we are guaranteed that it generates a unique global solution V in the energy classthat satisfies the energy identity:Based on that fact, one may prove that the additional regularity of V 0 is preserved through the time evolution (see Theorem 4.1 in the Appendix), that is). Let us now state our main existence result for (1.1) in the two-dimensional setting.There exists a large constant C such that for V 0 = Pv 0 , the divergence-free part of the initial velocity, we setand if ν satisfieswhere Q stands for the projection operator on potential vector-fields, then there exists a unique global in time regular solution (̺, v) to (1.1) such tha...