For the Boltzmann equation with an external force in the form of the gradient of a potential function in space variable, the stability of its stationary solutions as local Maxwellians was studied by S. Ukai et al. (2005) through the energy method. Based on this stability analysis and some techniques on analyzing the convergence rates to station- ary solutions for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, in this paper, we study the convergence rate to the above stationary solutions for the Boltzmann equation which is a fundamental equation in statistical physics for non-equilibrium rarefied gas. By combining the dissipation from the viscosity and heat conductivity on the fluid components and the dissipation on the non-fluid component through the celebrated H-theorem, a convergence rate of the same order as the one for the compressible Navier-Stokes is obtained by constructing some

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.

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 study the nonlinear stability of travelling wave solutions with shock profile for a relaxation model with a nonconvex flux, which is proposed by Jin and Xin [<i>Comm. Pure Appl. Math.</i>, 48 (1995), pp. 555--563] to approximate an original hyperbolic system numerically under the subcharacteristic condition introduced by T. P. Liu [<i>Comm. Math. Phys.</i>, 108 (1987), pp. 153--175]. The travelling wave solutions with strong shock profile are shown to be asymptotically stable under small disturbances with integral zero using an elementary but technical energy method. Proofs involve detailed study of the error equation for disturbances using the same weight function introduced in [<i>Comm. Math. Phys.</i>, 165 (1994), pp. 83--96].

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.