Local well-posedness and asymptotic analysis of a nonlocal incompressible Navier--Stokes--Korteweg system

Abstract: We consider a relaxed formulation of the inhomogeneous incompressible Navier--Stokes--Korteweg system, where the classical third-order capillarity term is replaced by a nonlocal approximation. We first establish the local-in-time well-posedness of the relaxed system, under standard regularity and positivity assumptions on the initial data. The existence time is uniform with respect to both the capillarity coefficient and the relaxation parameter. We then study two asymptotic limits of the system: the nonlocal-to-local limit as the relaxation parameter tends to infinity, and the vanishing capillarity limit. In each case, we prove convergence of the solution to that of the corresponding target system. Our analysis provides a rigorous justification for the use of nonlocal relaxation models in approximating capillarity-driven incompressible fluid flows.