We study the front dynamics of the bistable reaction-diffusion equations with periodic diffusion and/or convection coefficients in several space dimensions. When traveling wave solutions exist, the solutions of the initial value problem behave as wave fronts propagating with the effective speeds of traveling waves under various initial conditions. Yet due to the bistable nature of the nonlinearity, traveling waves may not always exist when the medium variations from the mean states are large enough. Their existence is closely related to the detailed forms of diffusion and convection coefficients, more so in multidimension than in one. We present a simple sufficient condition for the nonexistence of traveling waves (quenching) using perturbation method. Our two dimensional finite difference numerical computations show a variety of front behaviors, such as: the propagation, quenching and retreat of fronts. We found

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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.

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.

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