This paper establishes a blowup criterion for the three-dimensional viscous, compressible, and heat conducting magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) flows. It is essentially shown that for the Cauchy problem and the initial-boundary-value one of the three-dimensional compressible MHD flows with initial density allowed to vanish, the strong or smooth solution exists globally if the density is bounded from above and the velocity satisfies Serrin’s condition. Therefore, if the Serrin norm of the velocity remains bounded, it is not possible for other kinds of singularities (such as vacuum states vanishing or vacuum appearing in the non-vacuum region or even milder singularities) to form before the density becomes unbounded. This criterion is analogous to the well known Serrin’s blowup criterion for the three-dimensional incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, in particular, it is independent of the temperature and magnetic field and is just the same as that of the barotropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations. As a direct application, it is shown that the same result also holds for the strong or smooth solutions to the three-dimensional full compressible Navier-Stokes system describing the motion of a viscous, compressible, and heat conducting fluid.

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As a typical example of hyperbolic conservation laws, the system of Euler equations representing the conservation of mass, momentum and energy has three basic wave patterns. They are two nonlinear waves called shock and rarefaction wave, and one linearly degenerate wave called contact discontinuity. These basic wave patterns have their counterparts both in other physical models for gas motions in equilibrium involving viscosity and heat conductivity, and gas motion in non-equilibrium. The stability of these basic wave patterns in the system of Navier-Stokes equations and the Boltzmann equation has been an active research topic. Even though the stability of the two nonlinear wave patterns has been extensively studied, the stability of the linearly degenerate contact wave was not solved until recently. In this paper, we will briefly present our recent results in [32] on the stability of the contact wave patterns for both the Navier-Stokes equations and the Boltzmann equation.

It is well known that the Boltzmann equation is related to the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations in the field of gas dynamics. The relation is either for small Knudsen number, or, for dissipative waves in the time-asymptotic sense. In this paper, we show that rarefaction waves for the Boltzmann equation are time-asymptotic stable and tend to the rarefaction waves for the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. Our main tool is the combination of techniques for viscous conservation laws and the energy method based on micro-macro decomposition of the Boltzmann equation. The expansion nature of the rarefaction waves and the suitable microscopic version of the <i>H</i>-theorem are essential elements of our analysis.

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