In biological transport mechanisms such as insect respiration and renal filtration, fluid travels along a leaky channel allowing material exchange with systems exterior to the channel. The channels in these systems may undergo peristaltic pumping which is thought to enhance the material exchange. To date, little analytic work has been done to study the effect of pumping on material extraction across the channel walls. In this paper, we examine a fluid extraction model in which fluid flowing through a leaky channel is exchanged with fluid in a reservoir. The channel walls are allowed to contract and expand uniformly, simulating a pumping mechanism. In order to efficiently determine solutions of the model, we derive a formal power series solution for the Stokes equations in a finite channel with uniformly contracting/expanding permeable walls. This flow has been well studied in the case in which the normal velocity at the channel walls is proportional to the wall velocity. In contrast we do not assume flow that is proportional to the wall velocity, but flow that is driven by hydrostatic pressure, and we use Darcy’s law to close our system for normal wall velocity. We incorporate our flow solution into a model that tracks the material pressure exterior to the channel. We use this model to examine flux across the channel-reservoir barrier and demonstrate that pumping can either enhance or impede fluid extraction across channel walls. We find that associated with each set of physical flow and pumping parameters, there are optimal reservoir conditions that maximize the amount of material flowing from the channel into the reservoir.

In this paper, we give a condition on the bicharacteristic which guarantees the global existence of the mild solution to the Boltzmann equation with an external force for the hard-sphere model and potentials with angular cutoff in infinite vacuum. This generalizes the previous results to the case when the force can have arbitrary strength. The constructive condition on the bicharacteristic is used to obtain the pointwise estimates on the collision operator so that the global existence comes from the contraction mapping theorem.

In this paper, we establish the optimal error estimate of the particle method for a family of nonlinear evolutionary partial differential equations, or the so-called b-equation. The b-equation, including the Camassa-Holm equation and the Degasperis-Procesi equation, has many applications in diverse scientific fields. The particle method is an approximation of the b-equation in Lagrangian representation. We also prove short-time existence, uniqueness and regularity of the Lagrangian representation of the b-equation.

In this paper, we study the multiplicity of positive solutions for the nonhomogeneous elliptic problem: u+ u= f (x) u p 1+ h (x) in R N. We will show how the shape of the graph of f (x) affects the number of positive solutions.

For the Boltzmann equation with an external potential force depending only on the space variables, there is a family of stationary solutions, which are local Maxwellians with space dependent density, zero velocity and constant temperature. In this paper, we will study the nonlinear stability of these stationary solutions by using the energy method. The analysis combines the analytic techniques used for the conservation laws using the fluid-type system derived from the Boltzmann equation (cf. [14]) and the dissipative effects on the fluid and non-fluid components of the Boltzmann equation through the celebrated H-theorem. To our knowledge, this is the first result on the global classical solutions to the Boltzmann equation with external force and non-trivial large time behavior in the whole space.