Global large strong solutions to the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with density-dependent viscosities, case I: isentropic flows

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the Cauchy problem for the three-dimensional barotropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations with density-dependent viscosities. By considering the system as an elliptic-dominated structure and defining suitable energy functionals, after the elaborate index analysis, we establish the global existence of strong solutions as long as the initial data is large enough. This is a big contrast to the classical results where the initial data is a small perturbation of some resting states.