Instantaneous unboundedness of the entropy and uniform positivity of the temperature for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with fast decay density

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of solutions to the 1D compressible Navier-Stokes equations with fast decaying density, revealing that entropy becomes unbounded immediately and temperature remains positive under certain decay rates.

Contribution

It establishes the instantaneous unboundedness of entropy and uniform positivity of temperature for solutions with fast decaying initial density, highlighting the sharpness of the decay rate threshold.

Findings

Entropy becomes unbounded immediately after initial time for certain decay rates.

Temperature remains uniformly positive for initial densities decaying faster than a critical rate.

The decay rate of initial density at the far field is sharp for the boundedness of entropy.

Abstract

This paper concerns the physical behaviors of any solutions to the one dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes equations for viscous and heat conductive gases with constant viscosities and heat conductivity for fast decaying density at far fields only. First, it is shown that the specific entropy becomes not uniformly bounded immediately after the initial time, as long as the initial density decays to vacuum at the far field at the rate not slower than $O\left(\frac1{|x|^{\ell_\rho}}\right)$ with $\ell_\rho>2$. Furthermore, for faster decaying initial density, i.e., $\ell_\rho\geq4$, a sharper result is discovered that the absolute temperature becomes uniformly positive at each positive time, no matter whether it is uniformly positive or not initially, and consequently the corresponding entropy behaves as $O(-\log(\varrho_0(x)))$ at each positive time, independent of the boundedness of the initial entropy. Such phenomena are in sharp contrast to the case with slowly decaying initial density of the rate no faster than $O(\frac1{x^2})$, for which our previous works \cite{LIXINADV,LIXINCPAM,LIXIN3DK} show that the uniform boundedness of the entropy can be propagated for all positive time and thus the temperature decays to zero at the far field. These give a complete answer to the problem concerning the propagation of uniform boundedness of the entropy for the heat conductive ideal gases and, in particular, show that the algebraic decay rate $2$ of the initial density at the far field is sharp for the uniform boundedness of the entropy. The tools to prove our main results are based on some scaling transforms, including the Kelvin transform, and a Hopf type lemma for a class of degenerate equations with possible unbounded coefficients.