Vanishing viscosity limits for the free boundary problem of compressible viscoelastic fluids with surface tension

Abstract

We consider the free boundary problem of compressible isentropic neo-Hookean viscoelastic fluid equations with surface tension. Under the physical kinetic and dynamic conditions proposed on the free boundary, we investigate the regularity of classical solutions to viscoelastic fluid equations in Sobolev spaces which are uniform in viscosity and justify the corresponding vanishing viscosity limits. The key ingredient of our proof is that the deformation gradient tensor in Lagrangian coordinates can be represented as a parameter in terms of the flow map so that the inherent structure of the elastic term improves the uniform regularity of normal derivatives in the limit of vanishing viscosity. This result indicates that the boundary layer does not appear in the free boundary problem of compressible viscoelastic fluids, which is different from the case studied by Mei et al. (2018) for the free boundary compressible Navier-Stokes system.