Stability of combination of rarefaction waves with viscous contact wave for compressible Navier-Stokes equations with temperature-dependent transport coefficients and large data

Abstract In this article, we study the large-time behavior of combination of the rarefaction waves with viscous contact wave for a one-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes system whose transport coefficients depend on the temperature. It is shown that if the adiabatic exponent γ is suitably close to 1, the unique solution global in time to ideal polytropic gas exists and asymptotically tends toward the combination of a viscous contact wave with rarefaction waves under large initial perturbation. New and subtle analysis is developed to overcome difficulties due to the smallness of γ – 1 to derive heat kernel estimates. Moreover, our results extend the studies in a previous work [F. M. Huang, J. Li, and A. Matsumura, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal. 197 (2010), no. 1, 89–116].