The formation and propagation of thermal fronts in a cylindrical medium that is undergoing microwave heating is studied in detail. The model consists of Maxwell's wave equation coupled to a temperature diffusion equation containing a bistable nonlinear term.

We consider a family \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} of \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} -periodic Schrdinger operators with \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} -interactions supported on a lattice of closed compact surfaces; within a minimal period cell one has \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} surfaces. We show that in the limit when \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} and the interactions strengths are appropriately scaled, \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} has at most \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} gaps within finite intervals, and moreover, the limiting behavior of the first \{\mathcal {H}^arepsilon\} _ {arepsilon> 0} gaps can be completely controlled through a suitable choice of those surfaces and of the interactions strengths.

In this paper, we consider the local existence of solutions to Euler equations with linear damping under the assumption of physical vacuum boundary condition. By using the transformation introduced in Lin and Yang (Methods Appl. Anal. 7 (3) (2000) 495) to capture the singularity of the boundary, we prove a local existence theorem on a perturbation of a planar wave solution by using LittlewoodPaley theory and justifies the transformation introduced in Liu and Yang (2000) in a rigorous setting.