Dissipative measure-valued solutions to the compressible Navier-Stokes system

Abstract

We introduce a new concept of dissipative measure-valued solution to the compressible Navier-Stokes system satisfying, in addition, a relevant form of the total energy balance. Then we show that a dissipative measure-valued and a standard smooth classical solution originating from the same initial data coincide (weak-strong uniqueness principle) as long as the latter exists. Such a result facilitates considerably the proof of convergence of solutions to various approximations including certain numerical schemes that are known to generate a measure-valued solution. As a byproduct we show that any measure-valued solution with bounded density component that starts from smooth initial data is necessarily a classical one.