We investigate the Navier–Stokes–Cattaneo–Christov (NSC) system in \(\mathbb {R}^d\) ( \(d\ge 3\) ), a model of heat-conductive compressible flows serving as a finite speed of propagation approximation of the Navier–Stokes–Fourier (NSF) system. Due to the presence of Oldroyd’s upper-convected derivatives, the system (NSC) exhibits a lack of hyperbolicity which makes it challenging to establish its well-posedness, especially in multi-dimensional contexts. In this paper, within a critical regularity functional framework, we prove the global-in-time well-posedness of (NSC) for initial data that are small perturbations of constant equilibria, uniformly with respect to the approximation parameter \(\varepsilon >0\) . Then, building upon this result, we obtain the sharp large-time asymptotic behaviour of (NSC) and, for all time \(t>0\) , we derive quantitative error estimates between the solutions of (NSC) and (NSF). To the best of our knowledge, our work provides the first strong convergence result for this relaxation procedure in the three-dimensional setting and for ill-prepared data. The (NSC) system is partially dissipative and incorporates both partial diffusion and partial damping mechanisms. To address these aspects and ensure the large-time stability of the solutions, we construct localized-in-frequency perturbed energy functionals based on the hypocoercivity theory. More precisely, our analysis relies on partitioning the frequency space into three distinct regimes: low, medium and high frequencies. Within each frequency regime, we introduce effective unknowns and Lyapunov functionals, revealing the spectrally expected dissipative structures.
