Global Resolution of the Physical Vacuum Singularity for Three-Dimensional Isentropic Inviscid Flows with Damping in Spherically Symmetric Motions

Abstract

For the gas–vacuum interface problem with physical singularity and the sound speed being $${C^{{1}/{2}}}$$ -H $${\ddot{\rm o}}$$ lder continuous near vacuum boundaries of the isentropic compressible Euler equations with damping, the global existence of smooth solutions and the convergence to Barenblatt self-similar solutions of the corresponding porous media equation are proved in this paper for spherically symmetric motions in three dimensions; this is done by overcoming the analytical difficulties caused by the coordinate’s singularity near the center of symmetry, and the physical vacuum singularity to which standard methods of symmetric hyperbolic systems do not apply. Various weights are identified to resolve the singularity near the vacuum boundary and the center of symmetry globally in time. The results obtained here contribute to the theory of global solutions to vacuum boundary problems of compressible inviscid fluids, for which the currently available results are mainly for the local-in-time well-posedness theory, and also to the theory of global smooth solutions of dissipative hyperbolic systems which fail to be strictly hyperbolic.