It is known that the singularity in the non-cutoff cross-section of the Boltzmann equation leads to the gain of regularity and a possible gain of weight in the velocity variable. By defining and analyzing a non-isotropic norm which precisely captures the dissipation in the linearized collision operator, we first give a new and precise coercivity estimate for the non-cutoff Boltzmann equation for general physical cross-sections. Then the Cauchy problem for the Boltzmann equation is considered in the framework of small perturbation of an equilibrium state. In this part, for the soft potential case in the sense that there is no positive power gain of weight in the coercivity estimate on the linearized operator, we derive some new functional estimates on the nonlinear collision operator. Together with the coercivity estimates, we prove the global existence of classical solutions for the Boltzmann equation in weighted Sobolev spaces.

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In the paper, we study the three-dimensional Prandtl equations, and prove that if one component of the tangential velocity field satisfies the monotonicity assumption in the normal direction, then the system is locally well-posed in the Gevrey function space with Gevrey index in ] 1, 2]. The proof relies on some new cancellation mechanism in the system in addition to those observed in the two-dimensional setting.

This article is a sequel to our previous work [13] concerned with the derivation of high-order homogenized models for the Stokes equation in a periodic porous medium. We provide an improved asymptotic analysis of the coefficients of the higher order models in the low-volume fraction regime whereby the periodic obstacles are rescaled by a factor η which converges to zero. By introducing a new family of order k corrector tensors with a controlled growth as η→0 uniform in k∈\N, we are able to show that both the infinite order and the finite order models converge in a coefficient-wise sense to the three classical asymptotic regimes. Namely, we retrieve the Darcy model, the Brinkman equation or the Stokes equation in the homogeneous cubic domain depending on whether η is respectively larger, proportional to, or smaller than the critical size η_{crit}∼ϵ2/(d−2). For completeness, the paper first establishes the analogous results for the perforated Poisson equation, considered as a simplified scalar version of the Stokes system.

The development of shocks in nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws may be regularized through either diffusion or relaxation. However, we have observed surprisingly that for some physical problems, when both of the smoothing factors - diffusion and relaxation - coexist, under appropriate asymptotic assumptions, the dispersive waves are enhanced. This phenomenon is studied asymptotically in the sense of the Chapman-Enskog expansion and demonstrated numerically.