The well-posedness of the three space dimensional Prandtl equations is studied under some constraint on its flow structure. Together with the instability result given in [28], it gives an almost necessary and sufficient structural condition for the stability of the three-dimensional Prandtl equations. It reveals that the classical Burgers equation plays an important role in determining this type of flow with special structure, that avoids the appearance of the secondary flow, an unstabilizing factor in the three-dimensional Prandtl boundary layers. And the sufficiency of the monotonicity condition on the tangential velocity field for the existence of solutions to the Prandtl boundary layer equations is illustrated in the three-dimensional setting. Moreover, it is shown that this structured flow is linearly stable for any smooth three-dimensional perturbation.

The global well-posedness of the Boltzmann equation with initial data of large amplitude has remained a long-standing open problem. In this paper, by developing a new L x L v 1 L x , v approach, we prove the global existence and uniqueness of mild solutions to the Boltzmann equation in the whole space or torus for a class of initial data with bounded velocity-weighted L x L v 1 L x , v norm under some smallness condition on the L x L v 1 L x , v norm as well as defect mass, energy and entropy so that the initial data allow large amplitude oscillations. Both the hard and soft potentials with angular cut-off are considered, and the large time behavior of solutions in the L x L v 1 L x , v norm with explicit rates of convergence are also studied.

The purpose of this research monograph is to survey some recent developments in the analysis of shock reflection-diffraction, to present our original mathematical proofs of von Neumann’s conjectures for potential flow, to collect most of the related results and new techniques in the analysis of partial differential equations achieved in the last decades, and to discuss a set of fundamental open problems relevant to the directions of future research in this and related areas.

We study the large time asymptotic speeds (turbulent flame speeds sT) of the simplified HamiltonJacobi (HJ) models arising in turbulent combustion. One HJ model is G-equation describing the front motion law in the form of local normal velocity equal to a constant (laminar speed) plus the normal projection of fluid velocity. In level set formulation, G-equations are HJ equations with convex (L1 type) but non-coercive Hamiltonians. The other is the quadratically nonlinear (L2 type) inviscid HJ model of MajdaSouganidis derived from the KolmogorovPetrovskyPiskunov reactive fronts. Motivated by a question posed by Embid, Majda and Souganidis (1995)[10], we compare the turbulent flame speeds sTs from these inviscid HJ models in two-dimensional cellular flows or a periodic array of steady vortices via sharp asymptotic estimates in the regime of large amplitude. The estimates are obtained by analyzing the action minimizing trajectories in the Lagrangian representation of solutions (Lax formula and its extension) in combination with delicate gradient bound of viscosity solutions to the associated cell problem of homogenization. Though the inviscid turbulent flame speeds share the same leading order asymptotics, their difference due to nonlinearities is identified as a subtle double logarithm in the large flow amplitude from the sharp growth laws. The turbulent flame speeds differ much more significantly in the corresponding viscous HJ models. 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we investigate the boundary layer behavior of solutions to the one dimensional Broadwell model of the nonlinear Boltzmann equation for small mean free path. We consider the analogue of Maxwell's diffusive and the reflexive boundary conditions. It is found that even for such a simple model, there are boundary layers due to purely kinetic effects which cannot be detected by the corresponding Navier-Stokes system. It is also found numerically that a compressive boundary layer is not always stable in the sense that it may detach from the boundary and move into the interior of the gas as a shock layer.