This work is concerned with our recently developed formalism of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. This formalism extends the classical irreversible thermodynamics which leads to classical thermodynamics and can not describe physical phenomena with long relaxations. With the extended theory, we obtain a generalized hydrodynamic system which can be used to describe the non-Newtonian fluids, heat transfer beyond Fourier's law and fluid flow in very short temporal and spatial scales. We study the mathematical structure of the generalized hydrodynamic system and show that it possesses a nice conservation-dissipation structure and therefore is symmetrizable hyperbolic. Moreover, we rigorously justify that this generalized hydrodynamic system tends to the classical hydrodynamics when the relaxation times approach to zero. This shows that the classical hydrodynamics can be derived as an approximation of our generalized one.

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.

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.

We study the hypocoercivity property for some kinetic equations in the whole space and obtain the optimal convergence rates of solutions to the equilibrium state in some function spaces. The analysis relies on the basic energy method and the compensating function introduced by Kawashima to the classical Boltzmann equation and developed by Glassey and Strauss in the relativistic setting. It is also motivated by the recent work (Duan et al., 2008 [8]) on the Boltzmann equation by combining the spectrum analysis and energy method. The advantage of the method introduced in this paper is that it can be applied to some complicated system whose detailed spectrum is not known. In fact, only some estimates through the Fourier transform on the conservative transport operator and the dissipation of the linearized operator on the subspace orthogonal to the collision invariants are needed.

The present paper concerns with the global structure and asymptotic behavior of the discontinuous solutions to flood wave equations. By solving a free boundary problem, we first obtain the global structure and large time behavior of the weak solutions containing two shock waves. For the Cauchy problem with a class of initial data, we use Glimm scheme to obtain a uniform BV estimate both with respect to time and the relaxation parameter. This yields the global existence of BV solution and convergence to the equilibrium equation as the relaxation parameter tends to 0.