Global existence of weak solutions to 3D compressible primitive equations with degenerate viscosity

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the compressible primitive equations (CPEs) with density-dependent viscosity for large initial data. The CPE model can be derived from the 3D compressible and anisotropic Navier–Stokes equations by hydrostatic approximation. Motivated by the work of Vasseur and Yu [SIAM J. Math. Anal. 48, 1489–1511 (2016); Invent. Math. 206, 935–974 (2016)], in which the global existence of weak solutions to the compressible Navier–Stokes equations with degenerate viscosity was obtained, we construct approximate solutions and prove the global existence of weak solutions to the CPE in this paper. In our proof, we first present the vertical velocity as a function of density and horizontal velocity, which plays a role in using the Faedo–Galerkin method to obtain the global existence of the approximate solutions. Then, we obtain the key estimates of lower bound of the density, the Bresch–Desjardins entropy on the approximate solutions. Finally, we apply compactness arguments to obtain global existence of weak solutions by vanishing the parameters in our approximate system step-by-step.