Stability of viscous contact wave for the full compressible Navier–Stokes–Korteweg equations with large perturbation

Abstract This study focuses on the stability of the viscous contact wave for the one-dimensional full Navier–Stokes–Korteweg equations with density-temperature dependent transport coefficients and large perturbation. Our findings demonstrate a Nishida–Smoller type result, indicating that the solution remains stable under large perturbation as long as γ − 1 is sufficiently small. Notably, the smallness of the capillary coefficient is unnecessary. We then employ the initial layer analysis technique to investigate the asymptotic behaviour in the W k , p norm. We show that the capillary term has a smoothing effect, which implies that the strong solution is indeed a smooth one. Our results represent an improvement over those previously reported in Chen and Sheng (2019 Nonlinearity 32 395–444). Furthermore, by applying the method in this study to the isothermal case, we can achieve a better outcome than Germain and LeFloch (2016 Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 69 3–61).