For the free surface problem of the highly subsonic heat-conducting inviscid flow in 2-D and 3-D, a priori estimates for geometric quantities of free surfaces, such as the second fundamental form and the injectivity radius of the normal exponential map, and the Sobolev norms of fluid variables are proved by investigating the coupling of the boundary geometry and the interior solutions. An interesting feature for the free surface problem studied in this paper is the loss of one more derivative than the problem of incompressible Euler equations for which a geometric approach was introduced by Christodoulou and Lindblad in [11]. Due to the loss of one more derivative and loss of symmetry of equations, the geometric approach in [11] needs to be substantially developed by exploring the interaction of large variation of temperature, heat-conduction, non-zero divergence of the fluid velocity and the evolution of free surfaces.

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The Cauchy problem for the barotropic compressible Navier--Stokes equations on the whole two-dimensional space with vacuum as far field density is considered. When the shear viscosity is a positive constant and the bulk one is a power function of density with the power bigger than four-thirds, the global existence and uniqueness of strong and classical solutions is established. It should be remarked that there are no restrictions on the size of the data.

We review the existence results of traveling wave solutions to the reaction-diffusion equations with periodic diffusion (convection) coefficients and combustion (bistable) nonlinearities. We prove that whenever traveling waves exist, the solutions of the initial value problem with either frontlike or pulselike data propagate with the constant effective speeds of traveling waves in all suitable directions. In the case of bistable nonlinearity and one space dimension, we give an example of nonexistence of traveling waves which causes quenching (localization) of wavefront propagation. Quenching (localization) only occurs when the variations of the media from their constant mean values are large enough. Our related numerical results also provide evidence for this phenomenon in the parameter regimes not covered by the analytical example. Finally, we comment on the role of the effective wave speeds in