Vanishing Viscosity Limit of the Navier-Stokes Equations to the Euler Equations for Compressible Fluid Flow with Vacuum

Abstract: We establish the vanishing viscosity limit of the Navier-Stokes equations to the Euler equations for three-dimensional compressible isentropic flow in the whole space. It is shown that there exists a unique regular solution of compressible Navier-Stokes equations with density-dependent viscosities, arbitrarily large initial data and vacuum, whose life span is uniformly positive in the vanishing viscosity limit. It is worth paying special attention that, via introducing a "quasi-symmetric hyperbolic"--"degenerate elliptic" coupled structure, we can also give some uniformly bounded estimates of $\displaystyle\Big(\rho^{\frac{\gamma-1}{2}}, u\Big)$ in $H^3$ space and $\rho^{\frac{\delta-1}{2}}$ in $H^2$ space (adiabatic exponent $\gamma>1$ and $1<\delta \leq \min{3, \gamma}$), which lead the strong convergence of the regular solution of the viscous flow to that of the inviscid flow in $L^{\infty}([0, T]; H^{s'})$ (for any $s'\in [2, 3)$) space with the rate of $\epsilon^{2(1-s'/3)}$. Further more, we point out that our framework in this paper is applicable to other physical dimensions, say 1 and 2, with some minor modifications. This paper is based on our early preprint in 2015.