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.

In this paper, we investigate the initial-boundary value problem to the heat conductive compressible Navier-Stokes equations. Local existence and uniqueness of strong solutions is established with any such initial data that the initial density $\rho_0$, velocity $u_0$, and temperature $\theta_0$ satisfy $\rho_0\in W^{1,q}$, with $q\in(3,6)$, $u_0\in H^1$, and $\sqrt{\rho_0}\theta_0\in L^2$. The initial density is assumed to be only nonnegative and thus the initial vacuum is allowed. In addition to the necessary regularity assumptions, we do not require any initial compatibility conditions such as those proposed in (Y. Cho and H. Kim, \emph{Existence results for viscous polytropic fluids with vacuum}, J. Differential Equations {\bf 228} (2006), no.~2, 377--411.), which although are widely used in many previous works but put some inconvenient constraints on the initial data. Due to the weaker regularities of the initial data and the absence of the initial compatibility conditions, leading to weaker regularities of the solutions compared with those in the previous works, the uniqueness of solutions obtained in the current paper does not follow from the arguments used in the existing literatures. Our proof of the uniqueness of solutions is based on the following new idea of two-stages argument: (i) showing that the difference of two solutions (or part of their components) with the same initial data is controlled by some power function of the time variable; (ii) carrying out some singular-in-time weighted energy differential inequalities fulfilling the structure of the Gr\"onwall inequality. The existence is established in the Euler coordinates, while the uniqueness is proved in the Lagrangian coordinates first and then transformed back to the Euler coordinates.

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.

We propose a conservation-dissipation formalism (CDF) for coarse-grained descriptions of irreversible processes. This formalism is based on a stability criterion for non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The criterion ensures that non-equilibrium states tend to equilibrium in long time. As a systematic methodology, CDF provides a feasible procedure in choosing non-equilibrium state variables and determining their evolution equations. The equations derived in CDF have a unified elegant form. They are globally hyperbolic, allow a convenient definition of weak solutions, and are amenable to existing numerics. More importantly, CDF is a genuinely nonlinear formalism and works for systems far away from equilibrium. With this formalism, we formulate novel thermodynamics theories for heat conduction in rigid bodies and non-isothermal compressible Maxwell fluid flows as two typical examples. In these examples, the non-equilibrium variables are exactly the conjugate variables of the heat fluxes or stress tensors. The new theory generalizes Cattaneo’s law or Maxwell’s law in a regularized and nonlinear fashion.

In this note, we study submanifold geometry of the Atiyah--Hitchin manifold, a double cover of the 2-monopole moduli space, which plays an important role in various settings such as the supersymmetric background of string theory. When the manifold is naturally identified as the total space of a line bundle over S^2, the zero section is a distinguished minimal 2-sphere of considerable interest. In particular, there has been a conjecture about the uniqueness of this minimal 2-sphere among all closed minimal 2-surfaces. We show that this minimal 2-sphere satisfies the ``strong stability condition" proposed in our earlier work, and confirm the global uniqueness as a corollary.