In this survey paper, we will present the recent work on the study of the compressible fluids with vacuum states by illustrating its interesting and singular behavior through some systems of fluid dynamics, that is, Euler equations, EulerPoisson equations and NavierStokes equations. The main concern is the well-posedness of the problem when vacuum presents and the singular behavior of the solution near the interface separating the vacuum and the gas. Furthermore, the relation of the solutions for the gas dynamics with vacuum to those of the Boltzmann equation will also be discussed. In fact, the results obtained so far for vacuum states are far from being complete and satisfactory. Therefore, this paper can only be served as an introduction to this interesting field which has many open and challenging mathematical problems. Moreover, the problems considered here are limited to the author's interest and

METHODS AND APPLICATIONS OF ANALYSIS. 2000 International Press Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 495-510, September 2000 007

We study homogenization of the G-equation with a flow straining term (or the strain G-equation) in two dimensional periodic cellular flow. The strain G-equation is a highly non-coercive and non-convex level set HamiltonJacobi equation. The main objective is to investigate how the flow induced straining (the nonconvex term) influences front propagation as the flow intensity <i>A</i> increases. Three distinct regimes are identified. When <i>A</i> is below the critical level, homogenization holds and the turbulent flame speed <i>s</i> _T (effective Hamiltonian) is well-defined for any periodic flow with small divergence and is enhanced by the cellular flow as <i>s</i> _T <i>O</i>(<i>A</i>/log <i>A</i>). In the second regime where <i>A</i> is slightly above the critical value, homogenization breaks down, and <i>s</i> _T is not well-defined along any direction. Solutions become a mixture of a fast moving part and a stagnant part. When <i>A</i> is