Transonic Flows with Shocks Past Curved Wedges for the Full Euler Equations

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence, stability, and asymptotic behavior of transonic shock flows past curved wedges for the full Euler equations, using a novel potential function approach and free boundary problem techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to analyze transonic shocks for the full Euler equations, allowing variable Bernoulli constants and reformulating the problem as a fixed boundary elliptic PDE.

Findings

Established existence and stability of transonic shock solutions.

Derived a single nonlinear elliptic equation for the potential function.

Proved unique asymptotic behavior of solutions at infinity.

Abstract

We establish the existence, stability, and asymptotic behavior of transonic flows with a transonic shock past a curved wedge for the steady full Euler equations in an important physical regime, which form a nonlinear system of mixed-composite hyperbolic-elliptic type. To achieve this, we first employ the coordinate transformation of Euler-Lagrange type and then exploit one of the new equations to identify a potential function in Lagrangian coordinates. By capturing the conservation properties of the Euler system, we derive a single second-order nonlinear elliptic equation for the potential function in the subsonic region so that the transonic shock problem is reformulated as a one-phase free boundary problem for a second-order nonlinear elliptic equation with the shock-front as a free boundary. One of the advantages of this approach is that, given the shock location or quivalently the entropy function along the shock-front downstream, all the physical variables can expressed as functions of the gradient of the potential function, and the downstream asymptotic behavior of the potential function at the infinite exit can be uniquely determined with uniform decay rate. To solve the free boundary problem, we employ the hodograph transformation to transfer the free boundary to a fixed boundary, while keeping the ellipticity of the second-order equations, and then update the entropy function to prove that it has a fixed point. Another advantage in our analysis here is in the context of the real full Euler equations so that the solutions do not necessarily obey Bernoulli's law with a uniform Bernoulli constant, that is, the Bernoulli constant is allowed to change for different fluid trajectories.