Shallow water equations: viscous solutions and inviscid limit

We establish the inviscid limit of the viscous shallow water equations to the Saint-Venant system. For the viscous equations, the viscosity terms are more degenerate when the shallow water is close to the bottom, in comparison with the classical Navier-Stokes equations for barotropic gases; thus, the analysis in our earlier work for the classical Navier-Stokes equations does not apply directly, which require new estimates to deal with the additional degeneracy. We first introduce a notion of entropy solutions to the viscous shallow water equations and develop an approach to establish the global existence of such solutions and their uniform energy-type estimates with respect to the viscosity coefficient. These uniform estimates yield the existence of measure-valued solutions to the Saint-Venant system generated by the viscous solutions. Based on the uniform energy-type estimates and the features of the Saint-Venant system, we further establish that the entropy dissipation measures of the viscous solutions for weak entropy-entropy flux pairs, generated by compactly supported C (2) test-functions, are confined in a compact set in H (-1), which yields that the measure-valued solutions are confined by the Tartar-Murat commutator relation. Then, the reduction theorem established in Chen and Perepelitsa [5] for the measure-valued solutions with unbounded support leads to the convergence of the viscous solutions to a finite-energy entropy solution of the Saint-Venant system with finite-energy initial data, which is relative with respect to the different end-states of the bottom topography of the shallow water at infinity. The analysis also applies to the inviscid limit problem for the Saint-Venant system in the presence of friction.