Existence results for viscous polytropic fluids with vacuum

We consider the full Navier-Stokes equations for viscous polytropic fluids with nonnegative thermal conductivity. We prove the existence of unique local strong solutions for all initial data satisfying some compatibility condition. The initial density need not be positive and may vanish in an open set. Moreover our results hold for both bounded and unbounded domains. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.