Partial regularity for Navier-Stokes and liquid crystals inequalities without maximum principle

Abstract

In 1985, V. Scheffer discussed partial regularity results for what he called solutions to the "Navier-Stokes inequality". These maps essentially satisfy the incompressibility condition as well as the local and global energy inequalities and the pressure equation which may be derived formally from the Navier-Stokes system of equations, but they are not required to satisfy the Navier-Stokes system itself. We extend this notion to a system considered by Fang-Hua Lin and Chun Liu in the mid 1990s related to models of the flow of nematic liquid crystals, which include the Navier-Stokes system when the "director field" $d$ is taken to be zero. In addition to an extended Navier-Stokes system, the Lin-Liu model includes a further parabolic system which implies an a priori maximum principle for $d$ which they use to establish partial regularity (specifically, $\mathcal{P}^{1}(\mathcal{S})=0$) of solutions. For the analogous "inequality" one loses this maximum principle, but here we nonetheless establish certain partial regularity results (namely $\mathcal{P}^{\frac 92 + \delta}(\mathcal{S})=0$, so that in particular the putative singular set $\mathcal{S}$ has space-time Lebesgue measure zero). Under an additional assumption on $d$ for any fixed value of a certain parameter $\sigma \in (5,6)$ (which for $\sigma =6$ reduces precisely to the boundedness of $d$ used by Lin and Liu), we obtain the same partial regularity ($\mathcal{P}^{1}(\mathcal{S})=0$) as do Lin and Liu. In particular, we recover the partial regularity result ($\mathcal{P}^{1}(\mathcal{S})=0$) of Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg (1982) for "suitable weak solutions" of the Navier-Stokes system, and we verify Scheffer's assertion that the same hold for solutions of the weaker "inequality" as well.