On the vanishing viscosity limit for inhomogeneous incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on bounded domains

Abstract In this paper we study the vanishing viscosity limit for the inhomogeneous incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on bounded domains with no-slip boundary condition in two or three space dimensions. We show that, under suitable assumptions on the density, we can establish the convergence in energy space of Leray-Hopf type solutions of the Navier-Stokes equation to a smooth solution of the Euler equations if and only if the energy dissipation vanishes on a boundary layer with thickness proportional to the viscosity. This extends Kato’s criterion for homogeneous Navier-Stokes equations to the inhomogeneous case. We use a new relative energy functional in our proof.