We study the detailed process of bifurcation in the flow’s topological structure for a two-dimensional (2-D) incompressible flow subject to no-slip boundary conditions and its connection with boundary-layer separation. The boundary-layer separation theory of M. Ghil, T. Ma and S. Wang, based on the structural-bifurcation concept, is translated into vorticity form. The vorticity formulation of the theory shows that structural bifurcation occurs whenever a degenerate singular point for the vorticity appears on the boundary; this singular point is characterized by nonzero tangential second-order derivative and nonzero time derivative of the vorticity. Furthermore, we prove the presence of an adverse pressure gradient at the critical point, due to reversal in the direction of the pressure force with respect to the basic shear flow at this point. A numerical example of 2-D driven-cavity flow, governed by the Navier Stokes equations, is presented; boundary-layer separation occurs, the bifurcation criterion is satisfied, and an adverse pressure gradient is shown to be present.

No abstract uploaded!

This paper is concerned with theoretical analysis of a heat and moisture transfer model arising from textile industries, which is described by a degenerate and strongly coupled parabolic system. We prove the global (in time) existence of weak solution by constructing an approximate solution with some standard smoothing. The proof is based on the physical nature of gas convection, in which the heat (energy) flux in convection is determined by the mass (vapor) flux in convection.

Although the decay in time estimates of the semi-group generated by the linearized Boltzmann operator without forcing have been well established, there is no corresponding result for the case with general external force. This paper is mainly concerned with the optimal decay estimates on the solution operator in some weighted Sobolev spaces for the linearized Boltzmann equation with a time dependent external force. No time decay assumption is made on the force. The proof is based on both the energy method through the macro-micro decomposition and the <i>L</i> ^<i>p</i>-<i>L</i> ^<i>q</i> estimates from the spectral analysis. The decay estimates thus obtained are applied to the study on the global existence of the Cauchy problem to the nonlinear Boltzmann equation with time dependent external force and source. Precisely, for space dimension <i>n</i>3, the

This work is devoted to study the global behavior of viscous flows contained in a symmetric domain with complete slip boundary. In such scenario the boundary no longer provides friction and therefore the perturbation of angular velocity lacks decaying structure. In fact, we show the existence of uniformly rotating solutions as steady states for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. By manipulating the conservation law of angular momentum, we establish a suitable Korn's type inequality to control the perturbation and show the asymptotic stability of the uniformly rotating solutions with small angular velocity. In particular, the initial perturbation which preserves the angular momentum would decay exponentially in time and the solution to the Navier-Stokes equations converges to the steady state as time grows up.