Variational principle of Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov (KPP) minimal front speeds provides a fast and accurate way for speed calculations. A variational principle based computation is carried out on a large ensemble of KPP random speeds through spatial, mean zero, stationary, Gaussian random shear flows inside two dimensional channel domains. In the regime of small root mean square (rms) shear amplitude, the enhancement of the ensemble averaged KPP front speed obeys the quadratic law. In the large rms amplitude regime, the enhancement follows the linear law. An asymptotic ensemble averaged speed formula is derived and agrees well with the numerics. Related theoretical results are presented with a brief outline of the ideas in the proofs. The ensemble averaged speed is found to increase sublinearly with enlarging channel widths, while the speed variance decreases. Direct simulations in the

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).

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 construct bounded classical solutions of the Boltzmann equation in the whole space without specifying any limit behaviors at the spatial infinity and without assuming the smallness condition on initial data. More precisely, we show that if the initial data is non-negative and belongs to a uniformly local Sobolev space in the space variable with Maxwellian type decay property in the velocity variable, then the Cauchy problem of the Boltzmann equation possesses a unique non-negative local solution in the same function space, both for the cutoff and non-cutoff collision cross section with mild singularity. The known solutions such as solutions on the torus (space periodic solutions) and in the vacuum (solutions vanishing at the spatial infinity), and solutions in the whole space having a limit equilibrium state at the spatial infinity are included in our category.

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.