ABSTRACT We investigate a kinetic model for the sedimentation of dilute suspensions of rod-like particles under gravity, deduced by Helzel, Otto, and Tzavaras (2011), which couples the impressible (Navier-)Stokes equation with the Fokker-Planck equation. With a no-flux boundary condition for the distribution function, we establish the existence and uniqueness of a global weak solution to the two dimensional model involving the Stokes equation.

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.

This paper presents a general methodology to design macroscopic fluid models that take into account localized kinetic upscaling effects. The fluid models are solved in the whole domain together with a localized kinetic upscaling that corrects the fluid model wherever it is necessary. This upscaling is obtained by solving a kinetic equation on the nonequilibrium part of the distri-bution function. This equation is solved only locally and is related to the fluid equation through a downscaling effect. The method does not need to find an interface condition as do usual domain decomposition methods to match fluid and kinetic representations. We show our approach applies to problems that have a hydrodynamic time scale as well as to problems with diffusion time scale. Simple numerical schemes are proposed to discretize our models, and several numerical examples are used to validate the method.

The development of shocks in nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws may be regularized through either diffusion or relaxation. However, we have observed surprisingly that for some physical problems, when both of the smoothing factors - diffusion and relaxation - coexist, under appropriate asymptotic assumptions, the dispersive waves are enhanced. This phenomenon is studied asymptotically in the sense of the Chapman-Enskog expansion and demonstrated numerically.

We study a semi-implicit time-difference scheme for magnetohydrodynamics of a viscous and resistive incompressible fluid in a bounded smooth domain with a perfectly conducting boundary. In the scheme, the velocity and magnetic fields are updated by solving simple Helmholtz equations. Pressure is treated explicitly in time, by solving Poisson equations corresponding to a recently de- veloped formula for the Navier-Stokes pressure involving the commutator of Laplacian and Leray projection operators. We prove stability of the time-difference scheme, and deduce a local-time well- posedness theorem for MHD dynamics extended to ignore the divergence-free constraint on velocity and magnetic fields. These fields are divergence-free for all later time if they are initially so.