Mass transport in multicomponent compressible fluids: Local and global well-posedness in classes of strong solutions for general class-one models

Abstract: We consider a system of partial differential equations describing mass transport in a multicomponent isothermal compressible fluid. The diffusion fluxes obey the Fick-Onsager or Maxwell-Stefan closure approach. Mechanical forces result into one single convective mixture velocity, the barycentric one, which obeys the Navier-Stokes equations. The thermodynamic pressure is defined by the Gibbs-Duhem equation. Chemical potentials and pressure are derived from a thermodynamic potential, the Helmholtz free energy, with a bulk density allowed to be a general convex function of the mass densities of the constituents. The resulting PDEs are of mixed parabolic--hyperbolic type. We prove two theoretical results concerning the well-posedness of the model in classes of strong solutions: 1. The solution always exists and is unique for short--times and 2. If the initial data are sufficiently near to an equilibrium solution, the well-posedness is valid on arbitrary large, but finite time intervals. Both results rely on a contraction principle valid for systems of mixed type that behave like the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. The linearised parabolic part of the operator possesses the self map property with respect to some closed ball in the state space, while being contractive in a lower order norm only. In this paper, we implement these ideas by means of precise a priori estimates in spaces of exact regularity.