In this paper, we give an instability criterion for the Prandtl equations in three-dimensional space, which shows that the monotonicity condition on tangential velocity fields is not sufficient for the well-posedness of the three-dimensional Prandtl equations, in contrast to the classical well-posedness theory of the two-dimensional Prandtl equations under the Oleinik monotonicity assumption. Both linear stability and nonlinear stability are considered. This criterion shows that the monotonic shear flow is linearly stable for the three-dimensional Prandtl equations if and only if the tangential velocity field direction is invariant with respect to the normal variable, and this result is an exact complement to our recent work (A well-posedness theory for the Prandtl equations in three space variables. arXiv:1405.5308 , 2014) on the well-posedness theory for the three-dimensional Prandtl

In this paper, we study the Li stability of perturbation of constant states for 2 x 2 systems of conservation laws. We introduce a nonlinear functional which is equivalent to the Li norm of the difference between the constant state and the approximate solutions consisting of elementary waves and is non-increasing in time for the limiting weak solution. This yields the Li stability of the constant states. The approximate solutions are constructed with the aid of wave tracing for the random choice method. Our functional reveals the aspects of nonlinear wave behavior, particularly the coupling of waves pertaining to different characteristic families, which affects the Li norm of the solutions.

We consider the optimization approach to the acousto-electric imaging problem. Assuming that the electric conductivity distribution is a small perturbation of a constant, we investigate the least-squares estimate analytically using (multiple) Fourier series, and confirm the widely observed fact that acousto-electric imaging has high resolution and is statistically stable. We also analyze the case of partial data and the case of limited-view data, in which some singularities of the conductivity can still be imaged.

In this paper, we study existence of global entropy weak solutions to a critical-case unstable thin lm equation in one-dimensional case ht + @x(h n @xxxh) + @x(h n+2@xh) = 0; where n  1. There exists a critical mass Mc = 2 p 6 3 found by Witelski etal. (2004 Euro. J. of Appl. Math. 15, 223{256) for n = 1. We obtain global existence of a non-negative entropy weak solution if initial mass is less than Mc. For n  4, entropy weak solutions are positive and unique. For n = 1,a nite time blow-up occurs for solutions with initial mass larger than Mc.For the Cauchy problem with n = 1 and initial mass less than Mc, we show that at least one of the following long-time behavior holds: the second moment goes to innity as the time goes to innity or h(
; tk) * 0 in L1 (R) for some subsequence tk ! 1.

In this paper, we establish the existence theory for general system of hyperbolic conservation laws and obtain the uniform <i>L</i> _<i>1</i> boundness for the solutions. The existence theory generalizes the classical Glimm theory for systems, for which each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate in the sense of Lax. We construct the solutions by the Glimm scheme through the wave tracing method. One of the key elements is a new way of measuring the potential interaction of the waves of the same characteristic family involving the angle between waves. A new analysis is introduced to verify the consistency of the wave tracing procedure. The entropy functional is used to study the <i>L</i> _<i>1</i> boundedness.