In this article, we propose a novel approach to construct macroscopic balance equations and constitutive equations describing various irreversible phenomena. It is based on the general principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and consists of four basic steps: picking suitable state variables, choosing a strictly concave entropy function, properly separating entropy fuxes and production rates, and determining a dissipation matrix. Our approach takes advantage of both extended irreversible thermodynamics and GENERIC formalisms and shows a direct correspondence with Levermore’s moment-closure hierarchies for the Boltzmann equation. As a direct application, a new ten-moment model beyond the classical hierarchies is constructed and is shown to recover the Euler equations in the equilibrium state. These interesting results may put various macroscopic modeling approaches, starting from the general principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, on a solid microscopic foundation based on the Boltzmann equation.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new characterization of the characteristic functions for the study on the measure valued solution to the homogeneous Boltzmann equation so that it precisely captures the moment constraint in physics. This significantly improves the previous result by Cannone and Karch (2010) [2] in the sense that the new characterization gives a complete description of infinite energy solutions for the Maxwellian cross section. In addition, the global in time smoothing effect of the infinite energy solution is justified as for the finite energy solution except for a single Dirac mass initial datum.

We study the stability and oscillation of traveling fronts in a three-component, advection-reaction biodegradation model. The three components are pollutant, nutrient, and bacteria concentrations. Under an explicit condition on the biomass growth and decay coefficients, we derive reduced, two-component, semilinear hyperbolic models through a relaxation procedure, during which biomass is slaved to pollutant and nutrient concentration variables. The reduced two-component models resemble the Broadwell model of the discrete velocity gas. The traveling fronts of the reduced system are explicit and are expressed in terms of hyperbolic tangent function in the nutrient-deficient regime. We perform energy estimates to prove the asymptotic stability of these fronts under explicit conditions on the coefficients in the system. In the small damping limit, we carry out Wentzel--Kramers--Brillouin (WKB) analysis on front

We study the critical and super-critical dissipative quasi-geostrophic equations in $\bR^ 2$ or $\bT^ 2$. Higher regularity of mild solutions with arbitrary initial data in H^{2-} is proved. As a corollary, we obtain a global existence result for the critical 2D quasi-geostrophic equations with periodic H^{2-} data. Some decay in time estimates are also provided.