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We study the well-posedness theory for the MHD boundary layer. The boundary layer equations are governed by the Prandtl-type equations that are derived from the incompressible MHD system with non-slip 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 local-in time existence, uniqueness of solutions for the nonlinear MHD boundary layer equations. Compared with the well-posedness 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.

We derive an exact solution for Stokes flow in an in a channel with permeable walls. We assume that at the channel walls, the normal component of the fluid velocity is described by Darcy's law and the tangential component of the fluid velocity is described by the no slip condition. The pressure exterior to the channel is assumed to be constant. Although this problem has been well studied, typical studies assume that the permeability of the wall is small relative to other non-dimensional parameters; this work relaxes this assumption and explores a regime in parameter space that has not yet been well studied. A consequence of this relaxation is that transverse velocity is no longer necessarily small when compared with the axial velocity. We use our result to explore how existing asymptotic theories break down in the limit of large permeability.

We consider the Cauchy problem for a second order weakly hyperbolic equation, with coefficients depending only on the time variable. We prove that if the coefficients of the equation belong to the Gevrey class $\gamma^{s_{0}}$ and the Cauchy data belong to $\gamma^{s_{1}}$ , then the Cauchy problem has a solution in $\gamma^{s_{0}}([0,T^{*}];\gamma^{s_{1}}(\mathbb{R}))$ for some$T$^{*}>0, provided 1≤$s$_{1}≤2−1/$s$_{0}. If the equation is strictly hyperbolic, we may replace the previous condition by 1≤$s$_{1}≤$s$_{0}.

We prove the existence of reaction-diffusion traveling fronts in mean zero space-time periodic shear flows for nonnegative reactions including the classical KPP (Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov) nonlinearity. For the KPP nonlinearity, the minimal front speed is characterized by a variational principle involving the principal eigenvalue of a space-time periodic parabolic operator. Analysis of the variational principle shows that adding a mean-zero space time periodic shear flow to an existing mean zero space-periodic shear flow leads to speed enhancement. Computation of KPP minimal speeds is performed based on the variational principle and a spectrally accurate discretization of the principal eigenvalue problem. It shows that the enhancement is monotone decreasing in temporal shear frequency, and that the total enhancement from pure reaction-diffusion obeys quadratic and linear laws at small and large shear amplitudes.