English

On the continuity in time of solutions to a generalized Navier--Stokes--Fourier system

Analysis of PDEs 2026-03-18 v2

Abstract

We consider the flow of a generalized non-Newtonian incompressible heat-conducting fluid in a~bounded two-dimensional domain, subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions for velocity and temperature. The fluid obeys a power-law constitutive relation for the Cauchy stress with exponent~pp. For p2p\geq 2 and finite-energy initial data, we establish the existence of a global-in-time weak solution that satisfies the entropy equality. The novelty of this work is the rigorous proof of time continuity of the temperature in L1(Ω)L^1(\Omega), a property not previously established in this setting. Furthermore, we prove regularity and time continuity for a weak solution of the entropy equation with a convective term and an L1L^1 right-hand side under minimal assumptions on the velocity regularity, in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We show that this continuity is equivalently described by vanishing dissipation on high level sets, a truncated variational inequality for admissible test functions, or the associated equality. This reveals the connection between energy dissipation, weak stability, and temporal regularity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.21218,
  title  = {On the continuity in time of solutions to a generalized Navier--Stokes--Fourier system},
  author = {Miroslav Bulíček and Petr Kaplický and Lucie Wintrová},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.21218},
  year   = {2026}
}