We study the wellposedness theory for the MHD boundary layer. The boundary layer equations are governed by the Prandtltype equations that are derived from the incompressible MHD system with nonslip boundary condition on the velocity and perfectly conducting condition on the magnetic field. Under the assumption that the initial tangential magnetic field is not zero, we establish the localitime existence, uniqueness of solutions for the nonlinear MHD boundary layer equations. Compared with the wellposedness theory of the classical Prandtl equations for which the monotonicity condition of the tangential velocity plays a crucial role, this monotonicity condition is not needed for the MHD boundary layer. This justifies the physical understanding that the magnetic field has a stabilizing effect on MHD boundary layer in rigorous mathematics. 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abstract We prove the convergence of the vortex blob method for a family of nonlinear evolutionary partial differential equations (PDEs), the so-called b-equation. This kind of PDEs, including the Camassa-Holm equation and the Degasperis-Procesi equation, has many applications in diverse scientific fields. Our convergence analysis also provides a proof for the existence of the global weak solution to the b-equation when the initial data is a nonnegative Radon measure with compact support.

In this paper we study the asymptotic nonlinear stability of discrete shocks for the Lax-Friedrichs scheme for approximating general m×m systems of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws. It is shown that weak single discrete shocks for such a scheme are nonlinearly stable in the Lp-norm for all p ≧ 1, provided that the sums of the initial perturbations equal zero. These results should shed light on the convergence of the numerical solution constructed by the Lax-Friedrichs scheme for the single-shock solution of system of hyperbolic conservation laws. If the Riemann solution corresponding to the given far-field states is a superposition of m single shocks from each characteristic family, we show that the corresponding multiple discrete shocks are nonlinearly stable in Lp (P ≧ 2). These results are proved by using both a weighted estimate and a characteristic energy method based on the internal structures of the discrete shocks and the essential monotonicity of the Lax-Friedrichs scheme.

A novel discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is developed to solve timedependent bi-harmonic type equations involving fourth derivatives in one and multiple space dimensions. We present the spatial DG discretization based on a mixed formulation and central interface numerical fluxes so that the resulting semi-discrete schemes are L^2 stable even without interior penalty. For time discretization, we use Crank–Nicolson so that the resulting scheme is unconditionally stable and second order in time. We present the optimal L^2 error estimate of O(h^{k+1}) for polynomials of degree k for semi-discrete DG schemes, and the L2 error of O(h^{k+1} + (\Delta t)^2) for fully discrete DG schemes. Extensions to more general fourth order partial differential equations and cases with non-homogeneous boundary conditions are provided. Numerical results are presented to verify the stability and accuracy of the schemes. Finally, an application to the one-dimensional Swift–Hohenberg equation endowed with a decay free energy is presented.

Edge states attract more and more research interests owing to the novel topologically protected properties. In this work, we studied edge modes and traveling edge states via the linear Dirac equation with so-called edge-admissible masses. The unidirectional edge state provides a heuristic approach to more general traveling edge states through the localized behavior along slowly varying edges. We show the dominated asymptotic solutions of two typical edge states that follow circular and curved edges with small curvature by the analytic and quantitative arguments.