We prove that the strong detonation travelling waves for a viscous combustion model are nonlinearly stable, that is, for a given perturbation of a travelling wave, the solution converges to a shifted travelling wave asymptotically as<i>t</i> . The rate of convergence is obtained. This work is a continuation of a previous work by done T.P. Liu and the first author in [7].

A uniform approach is introduced to study the existence of measure valued solutions to the homogeneous Boltzmann equation for both hard potential with finite energy, and soft potential with finite or infinite energy, by using Toscani metric. Under the non-angular cutoff assumption on the cross-section, the solutions obtained are shown to be in the Schwartz space in the velocity variable as long as the initial data is not a single Dirac mass without any extra moment condition for hard potential, and with the boundedness on moments of any order for soft potential.

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.

We investigate, by numerical simulation, the shear layer instability associated with the outer layer of a spiral vortex formed behind an impulsively started thin ellipse. The unstable free shear layer undergoes a secondary instability. We connect this instability with the dynamics of corner vortices adjacent to the tip of the ellipse by observing that the typical turnover time of the corner vortex matches the period of the unstable mode in the shear layer. We suggest that the corner vortex acts as a signal generator, and produces periodic perturbation which triggers the instability.

The approach based on the construction of some nonlinear functionals was proved to be robust in the study of the well-posedness theories of hyperbolic conservation laws, especially in one space dimensional case. In particular, a generalized entropy functional was constructed in [T.-P. Liu, T. Yang, A new entropy functional for scalar conservation laws, Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 52 (1999) 14271442] for the L 1 stability of weak solutions. However, this generalized functional is so far only defined for scalar equations with convex flux function. In this paper, we introduce a new nonlinear functional which is motivated by the new Glimm functional introduced in [J.-L. Hua, Z.-H. Jiang, T. Yang, A new Glimm functional and convergence rate of Glimm scheme for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws, preprint] for general scalar conservation laws. This functional improves the one given in [H.-X. Liu, T. Yang, A