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.

This paper is concerned with the Cauchy problem of the one-dimensional compressible Navier--Stokes equations with degenerate temperature dependent transport coefficients which satisfy conditions from the consideration in kinetic theory. A result on the existence and uniqueness of a globally smooth nonvacuum solution is obtained provided that the -norm of the initial perturbation) for some positive constant independent of . Here is the adiabatic gas constant. This is a Nishida--Smoller type global solvability result with large data.

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].

This article is a sequel to our previous work [13] concerned with the derivation of high-order homogenized models for the Stokes equation in a periodic porous medium. We provide an improved asymptotic analysis of the coefficients of the higher order models in the low-volume fraction regime whereby the periodic obstacles are rescaled by a factor η which converges to zero. By introducing a new family of order k corrector tensors with a controlled growth as η→0 uniform in k∈\N, we are able to show that both the infinite order and the finite order models converge in a coefficient-wise sense to the three classical asymptotic regimes. Namely, we retrieve the Darcy model, the Brinkman equation or the Stokes equation in the homogeneous cubic domain depending on whether η is respectively larger, proportional to, or smaller than the critical size η_{crit}∼ϵ2/(d−2). For completeness, the paper first establishes the analogous results for the perforated Poisson equation, considered as a simplified scalar version of the Stokes system.

We study the vanishing viscosity limit of the compressible NavierStokes equations to the Riemann solution of the Euler equations that consists of the superposition of a shock wave and a rarefaction wave. In particular, it is shown that there exists a family of smooth solutions to the compressible NavierStokes equations that converges to the Riemann solution away from the initial and shock layers at a rate in terms of the viscosity and the heat conductivity coefficients. This gives the first mathematical justification of this limit for the NavierStokes equations to the Riemann solution that contains these two typical nonlinear hyperbolic waves.