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

For systems of hyperbolic conservation laws, a new Glimm functional was recently constructed when the linearly degenerate manifold in each characteristic field is either the whole space or it consists of a finitely many smooth and transversal manifolds of codimension one. This new functional leads to the neat consistency and convergence rate estimation of the Glimm scheme. In this paper, by the motivation of the result in Ref. 2, we show that the corresponding new Glimm functional can be constructed for general systems only under the strict hyperbolicity assumption.

Given a strictly hyperbolic, genuinely nonlinear system of conservation laws, we prove the a priori bound u (t,) u (t,)= O (1)(1+ t) | ln | on the distance between an exact BV solution u and a viscous approximation u, letting the viscosity coefficient 0. In the proof, starting from u we construct an approximation of the viscous solution u by taking a mollification u* and inserting viscous shock profiles at the locations of finitely many large shocks for each fixed . Error estimates are then obtained by introducing new Lyapunov functionals that control interactions of shock waves in the same family and also interactions of waves in different families. 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

We study waves in convex scalar conservation laws under noisy initial perturbations. It is known that the building blocks of these waves are shock and rarefaction waves, both are invariant under hyperbolic scaling. Noisy perturbations can generate complicated wave patterns, such as diffusion process of shock locations. However we show that under the hyperbolic scaling, the solutions converge in the sense of distribution to the unperturbed waves. In particular, randomly perturbed shock waves move at the unperturbed velocity in the scaling limit. Analysis makes use of the Hopf formula of the related Hamilton-Jacobi equation and regularity estimates of noisy processes.

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.