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.

In this paper, we combine the method of constructing the compensating function introduced by Kawashima and the standard energy method for the study on the Landau equation with external forcing. Both the global existence of solutions near the time asymptotic states which are local Maxwellians and the optimal convergence rates are obtained. The method used here has its own advantage for this kind of studies because it does not involve the spectrum analysis of the corresponding linearized operator.

A semi-explicit formula of solution to the boundary layer system for thermal layer derived from the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with the non-slip boundary condition when the viscosity coefficients vanish is given, in particular in three space dimension. In contrast to the inviscid Prandtl system studied by [7] in two space dimension, the main difficulty comes from the coupling of the velocity field and the temperature field through a degenerate parabolic equation. The convergence of these boundary layer equations to the inviscid Prandtl system is justified when the initial temperature goes to a constant. Moreover, the time asymptotic stability of the linearized system around a shear flow is given, and in particular, it shows that in three space dimension, the asymptotic stability depends on whether the direction of tangential velocity field of the shear flow is invariant in the normal direction respective to the boundary.

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.

We show that in a tubular domain with sufficiently small width, the normal and tangential gradients of a harmonic function have almost the same L 2 norm. This estimate yields a sharp estimate of the pressure in terms of the viscosity term in the Navier-Stokes equation with no-slip boundary condition. By consequence, one can analyze the Navier-Stokes equations simply as a perturbed vector diffusion equation instead of as a perturbed Stokes system. As an application, we describe a rather easy approach to establish a new isomorphism theorem for the non-homogeneous Stokes system.