Mathematical Justification of a Baer–Nunziato Model for a Compressible Viscous Fluid with Phase Transition

Abstract In this work, we justify a Baer–Nunziato system including appropriate closure terms as the macroscopic description of a compressible viscous fluid that can occur in a liquid or a vapor phase in the isothermal framework. As a mathematical model for the two-phase fluid on the detailed scale we chose a non-local version of the Navier–Stokes–Korteweg equations in the one-dimensional and periodic setting. Our justification relies on anticipating the macroscopic description of the two-phase fluid as the limit system for a sequence of solutions with highly oscillating initial densities. Interpreting the density as a parametrized measure, we extract a limit system consisting of a kinetic equation for the parametrized measure and a momentum equation for the velocity. Under the assumption that the initial density distributions converge in the limit to a convex combination of Dirac-measures, we show by a uniqueness result that the parametrized measure also has to be a convex combination of Dirac-measures and, that the limit system reduces to the Baer–Nunziato system. This work extends existing results concerning the justification of Baer–Nunziato models as the macroscopic description of multi-fluid models in the sense, that we allow for phase transition effects on the detailed scale. This work also includes a new global-in-time well-posedness result for the Cauchy problem of the non-local Navier–Stokes–Korteweg equations.