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

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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.

Let G=(V,E) be a connected finite graph and Δ be the usual graph Laplacian. Using the calculus of variations and a method of upper and lower solutions, we give various conditions such that the Kazdan–Warner equation Δu=c−he^u has a solution on V, where c is a constant, and h:V→R is a function. We also consider similar equations involving higher order derivatives on graph. Our results can be compared with the original manifold case of Kazdan and Warner (Ann. Math. 99(1):14–47, 1974).

We study the vanishing viscosity limit of the compressible NavierStokes equations to the Riemann solution of the Euler equations that consists of the superposition of a shock wave and a rarefaction wave. In particular, it is shown that there exists a family of smooth solutions to the compressible NavierStokes equations that converges to the Riemann solution away from the initial and shock layers at a rate in terms of the viscosity and the heat conductivity coefficients. This gives the first mathematical justification of this limit for the NavierStokes equations to the Riemann solution that contains these two typical nonlinear hyperbolic waves.