We perform a computationl study of front speeds of G-equation models in time dependent cellular flows. The G-equations arise in premixed turbulent combustion, and are Hamilton-Jacobi type level set partial differential equations (PDEs). The curvature-strain G-equations are also non-convex with degenerate diffusion. The computation is based on monotone finite difference discretization and weighted essentially nonoscillatory (WENO) methods. We found that the large time front speeds lock into the frequency of time periodic cellular flows in curvature-strain G-equations similar to what occurs in the basic inviscid G-equation. However, such frequency locking phenomenon disappears in viscous G-equation, and in the inviscid G-equation if time periodic oscillation of the cellular flow is replaced by time stochastic oscillation.

For the viscous and heat-conductive fluids governed by the compressible NavierStokes equations with an external potential force, there exist non-trivial stationary solutions with zero velocity. By combining the L^p - L^q estimates for the linearized equations and an elaborate energy method, the convergence rates are obtained in various norms for the solution to the stationary profile in the whole space when the initial perturbation of the stationary solution and the potential force are small in some Sobolev norms. More precisely, the optimal convergence rates of the solution and its first order derivatives in L²-norm are obtained when the L¹-norm of the perturbation is bounded.

We revisit the homogenization problem for the Poisson equation in periodically perforated domains with zero Neumann data at the boundary of the holes and prescribed Dirichlet data at the outer boundary. It is known that, if the periodicity of the holes goes to zero but their volume fraction remains fixed and positive, the limit problem is a Dirichlet boundary value problem posed in the domain without the holes, and the effective diffusion coefficients are non-trivially modified; if that volume fraction goes to zero instead, i.e. the holes are dilute, the effective operator remains the Laplacian (that is, unmodified). Our main results contain the study of a "continuity" in those effective models with respect to the volume fraction of the holes and some new convergence rates for homogenization in the dilute setting. Our method explores the classical two-scale expansion ansatz and relies on asymptotic analysis of the rescaled cell problems using layer potential theory.

We study the homogenization of a stationary conductivity problem in a random heterogeneous medium with highly oscillating conductivity coefficients and an ensemble of simply closed conductivity resistant membranes. This medium is randomly deformed and then rescaled from a periodic one with periodic membranes, in a manner similar to the random medium proposed by Blanc, Le Bris, and Lions (2006). Across the membranes, the flux is continuous but the potential field itself undergoes a jump of Robin-type. We prove that, for almost all realizations of the random deformation, as the small scale of variations of the medium goes to zero, the random conductivity problem is well approximated by that of an effective medium which has deterministic and constant coefficients and contains no membrane. The effective coefficients are explicitly represented. One of our main contributions is to provide a solution to the associated auxiliary problem that is posed on the whole space with infinitely many interfaces, a setting that is out of the standard stationary ergodic framework.

In this paper we study the existence assertion of the initial boundary value problem for the equation $\frac{\partial u}{\partial t} = \Delta e^{-\Delta u}$. This problem arises in the mathematical description of the evolution of crystal surfaces. Our investigations reveal that the exponent in the equation can have a singular part in the sense of the Lebesgue decomposition theorem, and the exponential nonlinearity somehow “cancels” it out. The net result is that we obtain a solution $u$ that satisfies the equation and the initial boundary conditions in the almost everywhere (a.e.) sense.