Existence and Uniqueness of Global Strong Solutions for One-Dimensional Compressible Navier–Stokes Equations

We consider Navier–Stokes equations for compressible viscous fluids in one dimension. It is a well-known fact that if the initial datum are smooth and the initial density is bounded by below by a positive constant, then a strong solution exists locally in time. In this paper, we show that under the same hypothesis, the density remains bounded by below by a positive constant uniformly in time, and that strong solutions therefore exist globally in time. Moreover, while most existence results are obtained for positive viscosity coefficients, the present result holds even if the viscosity coefficient vanishes with the density. Finally, we prove that the solution is unique in the class of weak solutions satisfying the usual entropy inequality. The key point of the paper is a new entropy-like inequality introduced by Bresch and Desjardins for the shallow water system of equations. This inequality gives additional regularity for the density (provided such regularity exists at initial time).