The purpose of this paper is to provide global existence and uniqueness results for a family of fluid transport equations by establishing convergence results for the particle method applied to these equations. The considered family of PDEs is a collection of strongly nonlinear equations which yield traveling wave solutions and can be used to model a variety of flows in fluid dynamics. We apply a particle method to the studied evolutionary equations and provide a new self-contained method for proving its convergence. The latter is accomplished by using the concept of space-time bounded variation and the associated compactness properties. From this result, we prove the existence of a unique global weak solution in some special cases and obtain stronger regularity properties of the solution than previously established.

The existence of solution for the 2D-Keller-Segel system in the subcritical case, i.e. when the initial mass is less than 8π, is reproved. Instead of using the entropy in the free energy and free energy dissipation, which was used in the proofs (Blanchet et al. in SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 46:691–721, 2008; Electron. J. Differ. Equ. Conf. 44:32, 2006 (electronic)), the potential energy term is fully utilized by adapting Delort’s theory on 2D incompressible Euler equation (Delort in J. Am. Math. Soc. 4:553–386, 1991).

Motivated by a phenomenon of phase transition in a model of alignment of self-propelled particles, we obtain a kinetic mean-field equation which is nothing else than the Doi equation (also called Smoluchowski equation) with dipolar potential. In a self-contained article, using only basic tools, we analyze the dynamics of this equation in any dimension. We first prove global well-posedness of this equation, starting with an initial condition in any Sobolev space. We then compute all possible steady-states. There is a threshold for the noise parameter: over this threshold, the only equilibrium is the uniform distribution, and under this threshold, there is also a family of non-isotropic equilibria. We give a rigorous prove of convergence of the solution to a steady-state as time goes to infinity. In particular we show that in the supercritical case, the only initial conditions leading to the uniform distribution in large time are those with vanishing momentum. For any positive value of the noise parameter, and any initial condition, we give rates of convergence towards equilibrium, exponentially for both supercritical and subcritical cases and algebraically for the critical case.

This paper deals with a degenerate diffusion Patlak–Keller–Segel system in $n\geq 3$ dimension. The main difference between the current work and many other recent studies on the same model is that we study the diffusion exponent $m=2n/(n+2)$, which is smaller than the usual exponent $m^{*}=2-2/n$ used in other studies. With the exponent $m=2n/(n+2)$, the associated free energy is conformal invariant, and there is a family of stationary solutions $U_{\lambda,x_0}(x)=C(\frac{\lambda} {\lambda^2+|x-x_0|^2})^{\frac{n+2}{2}}$ $\forall \lambda>0$, $x_0\in {\mathbb R}^n$. For radially symmetric solutions, we prove that if the initial data are strictly below $U_{\lambda,0}(x)$ for some $\lambda$, then the solution vanishes in $L^1_{loc}$ as $t\to\infty$; if the initial data are strictly above $U_{\lambda,0}(x)$ for some $\lambda$, then the solution either blows up at a finite time or has a mass concentration at $r=0$ as time goes to infinity. For general initial data, we prove that there is a global weak solution provided that the $L^m$ norm of initial density is less than a universal constant, and the weak solution vanishes as time goes to infinity. We also prove a finite time blow-up of the solution if the $L^m$ norm for initial data is larger than the $L^m$ norm of $U_{\lambda,x_0}(x)$, which is constant independent of $\lambda$ and $x_0$, and the free energy of initial data is smaller than that of $U_{\lambda,x_0}(x)$.

We establish two nonlinear compactness theorems in Lp(0,T;B) with hypothesis on time translations, which are nonlinear counterparts of two results by Simon (1987) [1]. The first theorem sharpens a result by Maitre (2003) [10] and is important in the study of doubly nonlinear elliptic–parabolic equations. Based on this theorem, we then obtain a time translation counterpart of a result by Dubinskii˘ (1965) [5], which is supposed to be useful in the study of some nonlinear kinetic equations (e.g. the FENE-type bead–spring chains model).