A review is presented of recent results on front propagation in reaction-diffusion-advection equations in homogeneous and heterogeneous media. Formal asymptotic expansions and heuristic ideas are used to motivate the results wherever possible. The fronts include constant-speed monotone traveling fronts in homogeneous media, periodically varying traveling fronts in periodic media, and fluctuating and fractal fronts in random media. These fronts arise in a wide range of applications such as chemical kinetics, combustion, biology, transport in porous media, and industrial deposition processes. Open problems are briefly discussed along the way.

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In this paper, we study the asymptotic behavior of positive solutions of fractional Hardy-Henon equation with an isolated singularity at the origin. We give a classification of isolated singularities of positive solutions near x = 0. Further, we prove the asymptotic behavior of positive singular solutions. These results parallel those known for the Laplacian counterpart proved by Caffarelli, Gidas and Spruck (Caffarelli, Gidas and Spruck in Comm Pure Appl Math, 1981, 1989), but the technique is very different, since the ODEs analysis is a missing ingredient in the fractional case. Our proofs are based on a monotonicity formula, combined with a blow up (down) argument, the Kelvin transformation and uniqueness of solutions of related degenerate equations on semi spherical surface. We also investigate isolated singularities located at infinity of fractional Hardy-Henon equation.

We estimate the heat conducted by a cluster of many small cavities. We show that the dominating heat is a sum, over the number of cavities, of the heat generated by each cavity after interacting with each other. This interaction is described through densities computable as solutions of a closed, and invertible, system of time domain integral equations of second kind. As an application of these expansions, we derive the effective heat conductivity which generates approximately the same heat as the cluster of cavities, distributed in a three-dimensional bounded domain, with explicit error estimates in terms of that cluster. At the analysis level, we use time domain integral equations. Doing that, we have two choices. First, we can favor the space variable by reducing the heat potentials to the ones related to the Laplace operator (avoiding Laplace transform). Second, we can favor the time variable by reducing the representation to the Abel integral operator. As the model under investigation has time-independent parameters, we follow the first approach here.

For a bipolar hydrodynamic model of semiconductors in the form of EulerPoisson equations with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions, in this paper we first heuristically analyze the most probable asymptotic profile (the so-called diffusion waves) and then prove this long-time behavior rigorously. For this, we construct correction functions to show the convergence of the original solution to the diffusion wave with optimal convergence rates by the energy method. Moreover, in the case with Dirichlet boundary condition, when the initial perturbation is in some weighted L^1 space, a faster and optimal convergence rate is also given.