Mathematical derivation of viscous shallow-water equations with zero surface tension

The purpose of this paper is to derive rigorously the so called viscous shallow water equations given for instance page 958-959 in [A. Oron, S.H. Davis, S.G. Bankoff, Rev. Mod. Phys, 69 (1997), 931?980]. Such a system of equations is similar to compressible Navier-Stokes equations for a barotropic fluid with a non-constant viscosity. To do that, we consider a layer of incompressible and Newtonian fluid which is relatively thin, assuming no surface tension at the free surface. The motion of the fluid is described by 3d Navier-Stokes equations with constant viscosity and free surface. We prove that for a set of suitable initial data (asymptotically close to "shallow water initial data"), the Cauchy problem for these equations is well-posed, and the solution converges to the solution of viscous shallow water equations. More precisely, we build the solution of the full problem as a perturbation of the strong solution to the viscous shallow water equations. The method of proof is based on a Lagrangian change of variable that fixes the fluid domain and we have to prove the well-posedness in thin domains: we have to pay a special attention to constants in classical Sobolev inequalities and regularity in Stokes problem

A Lagrangian approach for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with variable density

Here we investigate the Cauchy problem for the inhomogeneous Navier-Stokes equations in the whole $n$-dimensional space. Under some smallness assumption on the data, we show the existence of global-in-time unique solutions in a critical functional framework. The initial density is required to belong to the multiplier space of $\dot B^{n/p-1}_{p,1}(\R^n)$. In particular, piecewise constant initial densities are admissible data \emph{provided the jump at the interface is small enough}, and generate global unique solutions with piecewise constant densities. Using Lagrangian coordinates is the key to our results as it enables us to solve the system by means of the basic contraction mapping theorem. As a consequence, conditions for uniqueness are the same as for existence