Density-Dependent Incompressible Fluids in Bounded Domains

This paper is devoted to the study of the initial value problem for density dependent incompressible viscous fluids in a bounded domain of with boundary. Homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions are prescribed on the velocity. Initial data are almost critical in term of regularity: the initial density is in W^1,q for some q > N, and the initial velocity has fractional derivatives in L^r for some r > N and arbitrarily small. Assuming in addition that the initial density is bounded away from 0, we prove existence and uniqueness on a short time interval. This result is shown to be global in dimension N = 2 regardless of the size of the data, or in dimension N ≥ 3 if the initial velocity is small. Similar qualitative results were obtained earlier in dimension N = 2, 3 by O. Ladyzhenskaya and V. Solonnikov in [18] for initial densities in W^1,∞ and initial velocities in with q > N.