The influences of non-Oberbeck-Boussinesq (NOB) effects on flow instabilities and bifurcation characteristics of Rayleigh-Benard convection are examined. The working fluid is air with reference Prandtl number Pr = 0.71 and contained in two-dimensional rigid cavities of finite aspect ratios. The fluid flow is governed by the low-Mach-number equations, accounting for the NOB effects due to large temperature difference involving flow compressibility and variations of fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity with temperature. The intensity of NOB effects is measured by the dimensionless temperature differential epsilon. Linear stability analysis of the thermal conduction state is performed. An epsilon(2) scaling of the leading-order corrections of critical Rayleigh number Ra-cr and disturbance growth rate sigma due to NOB effects is identified, which is a consequence of an intrinsic symmetry of the system. The influences of weak NOB effects on flow instabilities are further studied by perturbation expansion of linear stability equations with regard to epsilon, and then the influence of aspect ratio A is investigated in detail. NOB effects are found to enhance (weaken) flow stability in large (narrow) cavities. Detailed contributions of compressibility, viscosity and buoyancy actions on disturbance kinetic energy growth are identified quantitatively by energy analysis. Besides, a weakly nonlinear theory is developed based on centre-manifold reduction to investigate the NOB influences on bifurcation characteristics near convection onset, and amplitude equations are constructed for both codimension-one and -two cases. Rich bifurcation regimes are observed based on amplitude equations and also confirmed by direct numerical simulation. Weakly nonlinear analysis is useful for organizing and understanding these simulation results.

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We consider the Stokes conjecture concerning the shape of extreme 2-dimensional water waves. By new geometric methods including a non-linear frequency formula, we prove the Stokes conjecture in the original variables. Our results do not rely on structural assumptions needed in previous results such as isolated singularities, symmetry and monotonicity. Part of our results extends to the mathematical problem in higher dimensions.

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In this paper, we develop a class of nonlinear compact schemes based on our previous linear central compact schemes with spectral-like resolution [X. Liu, S. Zhang, H. Zhang and C-W. Shu, A new class of central compact schemes with spectral-like resolution I: Linear schemes, Journal of Computational Physics 248 (2013) 235-256]. In our approach, we compute the flux derivatives on the cell-nodes by the physical fluxes on the cell nodes and numerical fluxes on the cell centers. To acquire the numerical fluxes on the cell centers, we perform a weighted hybrid interpolation of an upwind interpolation and a central interpolation. Through systematic analysis and numerical tests, we show that our nonlinear compact scheme has high order, high resolution and low dissipation, and has the same ability to capture strong discontinuities as regular weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) schemes. It is a good choice for the simulation of multiscale problems with shock waves.