It is well-known that one-dimensional isentropic gas dynamics has two elementary waves, i.e., shock wave and rarefaction wave. Among the two waves, only the rarefaction wave can be connected to a vacuum. Given a rarefaction wave with one-side vacuum state to the compressible Euler equations, we can construct a sequence of solutions to one-dimensional compressible isentropic NavierStokes equations which converge to the above rarefaction wave with vacuum as the viscosity tends to zero. Moreover, the uniform convergence rate is obtained. The proof consists of a scaling argument and elementary energy analysis based on the underlying rarefaction wave structures.

We consider the stabilization of linear kinetic equations with a random relaxation term. The well-known framework of hypocoercivity by J. Dolbeault, C. Mouhot and C. Schmeiser (2015) ensures the stability in the deterministic case. This framework, however, cannot be applied directly for arbitrarily small random relaxation parameters. Therefore, we introduce a Galerkin formulation, which reformulates the stochastic system as a sequence of deterministic ones. We prove for the γ-distribution that the hypocoercivity framework ensures the stability of this series and hence the stochastic stability of the underlying random kinetic equation. The presented approach also yields a convergent numerical approximation.

The ellipsoidal BGK model was introduced in\cite {Ho} to fit the correct Prandtl number in the Navier-Stokes approximation of the classical BGK model. In the paper we establish the global existence of mild solutions to the Cauchy problem on the model for a class of initial data allowed to have large oscillations. The proof is motivated by a recent study of the same topic on the Boltzmann equation in\cite {DHWY}.

A generalized entropy functional was introduced in [T.-P. Liu, T. Yang, A new entropy functional for scalar conservation laws, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 52 (1999) 14271442] for the scalar hyperbolic conservation laws with convex flux function. This functional was crucially used in the functional approach to the L 1 stability study on the system of hyperbolic conservation laws when each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. However, how to construct the generalized entropy functional for scalar conservation laws with general flux, and then how to apply the functional approach to the L 1 study on general systems are still open. In this paper, we construct a new nonlinear functional which gives some partial answer to this question and we expect the analysis will shed some light on the future investigation in this direction.

The multi-scale zero relaxation singular limit for gas dynamics in thermal non-equilibrium with multiple non-equilibrium modes in multi-dimensions with physical boundaries from non-equilibrium to thermal equilibrium of compressible Euler flow is proved in this paper for analytical data by establishing the uniform local-in-time estimates. A cancellation mechanism is utilized to deal with the nonlinear singular terms that cause the increase in both time and space derivatives in energy estimates. The rates of the relaxations corresponding to different non-equilibrium modes tending to zero discussed in this paper can be arbitrarily different.