Both compressible and incompressible porous medium models are used in the literature to describe the mechanical properties of living tissues. These two classes of models can be related using a stiff pressure law. In the incompressible limit, the compressible model generates a free boundary problem of Hele-Shaw type where incompressibility holds in the saturated phase.Here we consider the case with a nutrient. Then, a badly coupled system of equations describes the cell density number and the nutrient concentration. For that reason, the derivation of the free boundary (incompressible) limit was an open problem, in particular a difficulty is to establish the so-called complementarity relation which allows to recover the pressure using an elliptic equation. To establish the limit, we use two new ideas. The first idea, also used recently for related problems, is to extend the usual Aronson-Bénilan estimates in L ∞ to an L 2 setting. The second idea is to derive a sharp uniform L 4 estimate on the pressure gradient, independently of space dimension.

In this work we study a tissue growth model with applications to tumour growth. The model is based on that of Perthame, Quirós, and Vázquez proposed in 2014 but incorporates the advective effects caused, for instance, by the presence of nutrients, oxygen, or, possibly, as a result of self-propulsion. The main result of this work is the incompressible limit of this model which builds a bridge between the density-based model and a geometry free-boundary problem by passing to a singular limit in the pressure law. The limiting objects are then proven to be unique.

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The incompressible limit of nonlinear diffusion equations of porous medium type has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, due to its ability to link the weak formulation of cell-population models to free boundary problems of Hele-Shaw type. Although vast literature is available on this singular limit, little is known on the convergence rate of the solutions. In this work, we compute the convergence rate in a negative Sobolev norm and, upon interpolating with BV -uniform bounds, we deduce a convergence rate in appropriate Lebesgue spaces.