In this paper, we will survey some recent results on the study of the viscous and invisid compressible flow with vacuum. It is wellknown that the study on vacuum has significance in the investigation on some important physical phenomena. However, most of the important questions about vacuum are still open due to the singularities caused by vacuum which need new mathematical tools and techniques to handle.

In this paper, we combine the method of constructing the compensating function introduced by Kawashima and the standard energy method for the study on the Landau equation with external forcing. Both the global existence of solutions near the time asymptotic states which are local Maxwellians and the optimal convergence rates are obtained. The method used here has its own advantage for this kind of studies because it does not involve the spectrum analysis of the corresponding linearized operator.

In this paper, we introduce a new Glimm functional for general systems of hyperbolic conservation laws. This new functional is consistent with the classical Glimm functional for the case when each characteristic field is either genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate, so that it can be viewed as optimal in some sense. With this new functional, the consistency of the Glimm scheme is proved clearly for general systems. Moreover, the convergence rate of the Glimm scheme is shown to be the same as the one obtained in Bressan, Marson (Arch Ration Mech Anal 142(2):155176, 1998) for systems with each characteristic field being genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate.

In the paper, we study the Prandtl system with initial data admitting non-degenerate critical points. For any index \sigma\in [3/2, 2], we obtain the local in time well-posedness in the space of Gevrey class \sigma\in [3/2, 2], in the tangential variable and Sobolev class in the normal variable so that the monotonicity condition on the tangential velocity is not needed to overcome the loss of tangential derivative. This answers the open question raised in the paper of D. Grard-Varet and N. Masmoudi [{\it Ann. Sci. c. Norm. Supr}.(4) 48 (2015), no. 6, 1273-1325], in which the case \sigma\in [3/2, 2], is solved.

In this paper we prove an existence theorem of global smooth solutions for the Cauchy problem of a class of quasilinear hyperbolic systems with nonlinear dissipative terms under the assumption that only the <i>C</i>⁰-norm of the initial data is sufficiently small, while the <i>C</i>¹-norm of the initial data can be large. The analysis is based on <i>a priori</i> estimates, which are obtained by a generalised Lax transformation.