In this paper we establish the local-in-time existence and uniqueness of strong solutions to the free boundary problem of the full compressible Navier-Stokes equations in three-dimensional space. The vanishing density and temperature condition is imposed on the free boundary, which captures the motions of the non-isentropic viscous gas surrounded by vacuum with bounded entropy. We also assume some proper decay rates of the density towards the boundary and singularities of derivatives of the temperature across the boundary on the initial data, which coincides with the physical vacuum condition for the isentropic flows. This extends the previous result of Liu [arXiv: 1612.07936] by removing the spherically symmetric assumption and considering more general initial density and temperature profiles.

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.

There are many open problems on the stability of nonlinear wave patterns to the Boltzmann equation even though the corresponding stability theory has been comparatively well-established for the gas dynamical systems. In this paper, we study the nonlinear stability of a rarefaction wave profile to the Boltzmann equation with the boundary effect imposed by specular reflection for both the hard sphere model and the hard potential model with angular cut-off. The analysis is based on the property of the solution and its derivatives which are either odd or even functions at the boundary coming from specular reflection, and the decomposition on both the solution and the Boltzmann equation introduced in [24, 26] for energy method.

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We establish several gradient estimates for second-order divergence type parabolic and elliptic systems. The coefficients and data are assumed to be Hlder or Dini continuous in the time variable and all but one spatial variable. This type of system arises from the problems of linearly elastic laminates and composite materials. For the proof, we use Campanatos approach in a novel way. Non-divergence type equations under similar conditions are also discussed.