The Boltzmann equation which describes the time evolution of a large number of particles through the binary collision in statistics physics has close relation to the systems of fluid dynamics, that is, Euler equations and NavierStokes equations. As for a basic wave pattern to Euler equations, we consider the nonlinear stability of contact discontinuities to the Boltzmann equation. Even though the stability of the other two nonlinear waves, i.e., shocks and rarefaction waves has been extensively studied, there are few stability results on the contact discontinuity because unlike shock waves and rarefaction waves, its derivative has no definite sign, and decays slower than a rarefaction wave. Moreover, it behaves like a linear wave in a nonlinear setting so that its coupling with other nonlinear waves reveals a complicated interaction mechanism. Based on the new definition of contact waves to the Boltzmann equation

The weak well-posedness of strong damping wave equations defined by fractal Laplacians is proved by using Galerkin method. These fractal Laplacians are defined by self-similar measures with overlaps, such as the well-known infinite Bernoulli convolution associated with the golden ratio, the three-fold convolution of the Cantor measure, and a class of self-similar measures that we call essentially of finite type. In general, the structure of self-similar measures with overlap are complicated and intractable. However, some important information about the structure of the three measures above can be obtained. We make use of these information to set up a framework for one-dimensional measures to discretize the equations, and use the finite element and central difference methods to obtain numerical approximations of the weak solutions. We also show that the numerical solutions converge to the actual solution and obtain the rate of convergence.

The immersed boundary method is one of the most useful computational methods in studying fluid structure interaction. On the other hand, the Immersed Boundary method is also known to require small time steps to maintain stability when solved with an explicit method. Many implicit or approximately implicit methods have been proposed in the literature to remove this severe time step stability constraint, but none of them give satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient semi-implicit scheme to remove this stiffness from the immersed boundary method for the Navier–Stokes equations. The construction of our semi-implicit scheme consists of two steps. First, we obtain a semiimplicit discretization which is proved to be unconditionally stable. This unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme is still quite expensive to implement in practice. Next, we apply the small scale decomposition to the unconditionally stable semi-implicit scheme to construct our efficient semi-implicit scheme. Unlike other implicit or semi-implicit schemes proposed in the literature, our semi-implicit scheme can be solved explicitly in the spectral space. Thus the computational cost of our semi-implicit schemes is comparable to that of an explicit scheme. Our extensive numerical experiments show that our semiimplicit scheme has much better stability property than an explicit scheme. This offers a substantial computational saving in using the immersed boundary method.

In this paper, we initiate the study of the instability of naked singularities without symmetries. In a series of papers, Christodoulou proved that naked singularities are not stable in the context of the spherically symmetric Einstein equations coupled with a massless scalar field. We study in this paper the next simplest case: a characteristic initial value problem of this coupled system with the initial data given on two intersecting null cones, the incoming one of which is assumed to be spherically symmetric and singular at its vertex, and the outgoing one of which has no symmetries. It is shown that, arbitrarily fixing the initial scalar field, the set of the initial conformal metrics on the outgoing null cone such that the maximal future development does not have any sequences of closed trapped surfaces approaching the singularity, is of first category in the whole space in which the shear tensors are continuous. Such a set can then be viewed as exceptional, although the exceptionality is weaker than the at least 1 co-dimensionality in spherical symmetry. Almost equivalently, it is also proved that, arbitrarily fixing an incoming null cone C––ε to the future of the initial incoming null cone, the set of the initial conformal metrics such that the maximal future development has at least one closed trapped surface before C––ε, contains an open and dense subset of the whole space. Since the initial scalar field can be chosen such that the singularity is naked if the initial shear is set to be zero, we may say that the spherical naked singularities of a self-gravitating scalar field are not stable under gravitational perturbations. This in particular gives new families of non-spherically symmetric gravitational perturbations different from the original spherically symmetric scalar perturbations given by Christodoulou.

In this paper we consider the initial-boundary value problem to the one-dimensional compressible Navier{Stokes equations for ideal gases. Both the viscous and heat conductive coeffcients are assumed to be positive constants, and the initial density is allowed to have vacuum. Global existence and uniqueness of strong solutions is established for any H2 initial data, which generalizes the well-known result of Kazhikhov and Shelukhin [J. Appl. Math. Mech., 41 (1977), pp. 273{282] to the case that with nonnegative initial density. An observation to overcome the diculty caused by the lack of the positive lower bound of the density is that the ratio of the density to its initial value is inversely proportional to the time integral of the upper bound of the temperature along the trajectory.