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 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.

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.

In this paper, we give a systematic study of the boundary layer behavior for linear convection-diffusion equation in the zero viscosity limit. We analyze the boundary layer structures in the viscous solution and derive the boundary condition satisfied by the viscosity limit as a solution of the inviscid equation. The results confirm that the Neumann type of far-field boundary condition is preferred in the outlet and characteristic boundary condition. Under some appropriate regularity and compatibility conditions on the initial and boundary data, we obtain optimal error estimates between the full viscous solution and the inviscid solution with suitable boundary layer corrections. These results hold in arbitrary space dimensions and similar statements also hold for the strip problem. This model well describes the behavior at the far-field for many physical and engineering systems such as fluid dynamical equation and electro-magnetic equation. The results obtained here should provide some theoretical guidance for designing effective far-field boundary conditions.

For the class of graph-directed self-similar measures on R, which could have overlaps but are essentially of finite type, we set up a framework for deriving a closed formula for the spectral dimension of the Laplacians defined by these measures. For the class of finitely ramified graph-directed self-similar sets, the spectral dimension of the associated Laplace operators has been obtained by Hambly and Nyberg [6]. The main novelty of our results is that the graph-directed self-similar measures we consider do not need to satisfy the graph open set condition.