In this paper, we establish the existence theory for general system of hyperbolic conservation laws and obtain the uniform <i>L</i> _<i>1</i> boundness for the solutions. The existence theory generalizes the classical Glimm theory for systems, for which each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate in the sense of Lax. We construct the solutions by the Glimm scheme through the wave tracing method. One of the key elements is a new way of measuring the potential interaction of the waves of the same characteristic family involving the angle between waves. A new analysis is introduced to verify the consistency of the wave tracing procedure. The entropy functional is used to study the <i>L</i> _<i>1</i> boundedness.

We study detecting a boundary corrosion damage in the inaccessible part of a rectangular shaped electrostatic conductor from a one set of Cauchy data specied on an accessible boundary part of conductor. For this nonlinear ill-posed problem, we prove the uniqueness in a very general framework. Then we establish the conditional stability of Holder type based on some a priori assumptions on the unknown impedance and the electrical current input specied in the accessible part. Finally a regularizing scheme of double regularizing parameters, using the truncation of the series expansion of the solution, is proposed with the convergence analysis on the explicit regularizing solution in terms of a practical average norm for measurement data.

We consider the optimization approach to the acousto-electric imaging problem. Assuming that the electric conductivity distribution is a small perturbation of a constant, we investigate the least-squares estimate analytically using (multiple) Fourier series, and confirm the widely observed fact that acousto-electric imaging has high resolution and is statistically stable. We also analyze the case of partial data and the case of limited-view data, in which some singularities of the conductivity can still be imaged.

In this paper we prove the following long-standing conjecture: stable solutions to semi-linear elliptic equations are bounded (and thus smooth) in dimension n⩽9. This result, that was only known to be true for n⩽4, is optimal: log(1/|x|^2) is a W^{1,2} singular stable solution for n⩾10. The proof of this conjecture is a consequence of a new universal estimate: we prove that, in dimension n⩽9, stable solutions are bounded in terms only of their L^1 norm, independently of the non-linearity. In addition, in every dimension we establish a higher integrability result for the gradient and optimal integrability results for the solution in Morrey spaces. As one can see by a series of classical examples, all our results are sharp. Furthermore, as a corollary, we obtain that extremal solutions of Gelfand problems are W^{1,2} in every dimension and they are smooth in dimension n⩽9. This answers to two famous open problems posed by Brezis and Brezis–Vázquez.

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.