estimates for quantities advected by a compressible flow

We consider the evolution of a quantity advected by a compressible flow and subject to diffusion. When this quantity is scalar it can be, for instance, the temperature of the flow or the concentration of some pollutants. Because of the diffusion term, one expects the equations to have a regularizing effect. However, in their Euler form, the equations describe the evolution of the quantity multiplied by the density of the flow. The parabolic structure is thus degenerate near vacuum (when the density vanishes). In this paper we show that we can nevertheless derive uniform L p bounds that do not depend on the density (in particular the bounds do not degenerate near vacuum). Furthermore the result holds even when the density is only a measure. We investigate both the scalar and the system case. In the former case, we obtain L ∞ bounds. In the latter case the quantity being investigated could be the velocity field in compressible Navier–Stokes type of equations, and we derive uniform L p bounds for some p depending on the ratio between the two viscosity coefficients (the main additional difficulty in that case being to deal with the second viscosity term involving the divergence of the velocity). Such estimates are, to our knowledge, new and interesting since they are uniform with respect to the density. The proof relies mostly on a method introduced by De Giorgi to obtain regularity results for elliptic equations with discontinuous diffusion coefficients.