We study the front dynamics of the bistable reaction-diffusion equations with periodic diffusion and/or convection coefficients in several space dimensions. When traveling wave solutions exist, the solutions of the initial value problem behave as wave fronts propagating with the effective speeds of traveling waves under various initial conditions. Yet due to the bistable nature of the nonlinearity, traveling waves may not always exist when the medium variations from the mean states are large enough. Their existence is closely related to the detailed forms of diffusion and convection coefficients, more so in multidimension than in one. We present a simple sufficient condition for the nonexistence of traveling waves (quenching) using perturbation method. Our two dimensional finite difference numerical computations show a variety of front behaviors, such as: the propagation, quenching and retreat of fronts. We found

The nonlinear stability in the {L^p} -norm, p ≥ 1 , of stationary weak discrete shocks for the Lax-Friedrichs scheme approximating general m × m systems of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws is proved, provided that the summations of the initial perturbations equal zero. The result is proved by using both a weighted estimate and characteristic energy method based on the internal structures of the discrete shocks and the essential monotonicity of the Lax-Friedrichs scheme.

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

We consider the problem of the random fluctuations in the solutions to elliptic PDEs with highly oscillatory random coefficients. In our setting, as the correlation length of the fluctuations tends to zero, the heterogeneous solution converges to a deterministic solution obtained by averaging. When the Green’s function to the unperturbed operator is sufficiently singular (i.e., not square integrable locally), the leading corrector to the averaged solution may be either deterministic or random, or both in a sense we shall explain. Our main application is the solution of an elliptic problem with random Robin boundary condition that may be used to model diffusion of signaling molecules through a layer of cells into a bulk of extracellular medium. The problem is then described by an elliptic pseudo-differential operator (a Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator) on the boundary of the domain with random potential. In the physical setting of a three dimensional extracellular medium on top of a two-dimensional surface of cells forming a layer of epithelium, we show that the approximate corrector to averaging consists of a deterministic correction plus a Gaussian field of amplitude proportional to the correlation length of the random medium. The result is obtained under some assumptions on the four-point correlation function in the medium. We provide examples of such random media based on Gaussian and Poisson statistics.

We look for bounded periodic solutions for a parametric fractional problem involving a continuous nonlinearity with subcritical growth. By using a variant of Caffarelli and Silvestre extension method adapted to the periodic case and variational tools we prove the existence of at least three bounded periodic solutions when the parameter varies in an appropriate range.