Singular Limits in Thermodynamics of Viscous Fluids
We discuss some recent results concerning singular limits of the full Navier-Stokes-Fourier system, where one or several characteristic numbers become small or tend to infinity. The main ingredients of our approach read as follows:
- a general existence theory of global-in-time weak solutions for any finite energy data;
- uniform bounds independent of the value of the singular parameters based on total dissipation balance (Second law of thermodynamics);
- analysis of propagation of acoustic waves, in particular on unbounded or ``large' spatial domains.
Eduard Feireisl, Mathematical Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague