ON THE GLOBAL EXISTENCE OF CLASSICAL SOLUTIONS FOR COMPRESSIBLE NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS WITH VACUUM

In this paper we present a sufficient condition for the global well-posedness of classical solutions to an initial value problem of compressible isentropic Navier-Stokes equations in the whole space R-3. As an immediate result, the main theorem obtained implies that the Cauchy problem of compressible Navier-Stokes equations with vacuum has a global unique classical solution, provided the initial energy is sufficiently small, or the shear viscosity coefficient is sufficiently large, or the upper bound of the initial density is suitably small and the adiabatic exponent gamma is an element of (1, 3/2). These results particularly extend the recent ones due to Huang-Li-Xin [7], where the global well-posedness of classical solutions with small initial energy was established.