Stability of transonic contact discontinuity for two-dimensional steady compressible Euler flows in a finitely long nozzle

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of transonic contact discontinuities in two-dimensional steady compressible Euler flows within a finite nozzle, introducing new methods to handle the free boundary problem and establishing the existence of a unique transonic solution.

Contribution

It is the first work addressing the mixed-type free boundary problem of transonic flows across contact discontinuities in nozzles, developing novel techniques for solving the associated free boundary problem.

Findings

Established the existence of a unique piecewise smooth transonic solution.

Developed a new iteration scheme for hyperbolic-elliptic mixed problems.

Proved stability of contact discontinuities in the specified flow setting.

Abstract

We consider the stability of transonic contact discontinuity for the two-dimensional steady compressible Euler flows in a finitely long nozzle. This is the first work on the mixed-type problem of transonic flows across a contact discontinuity as a free boundary in nozzles. We start with the Euler-Lagrangian transformation to straighten the contact discontinuity in the new coordinates. However, the upper nozzle wall in the subsonic region depending on the mass flux becomes a free boundary after the transformation. Then we develop new ideas and techniques to solve the free-boundary problem in three steps: (1) we fix the free boundary and generate a new iteration scheme to solve the corresponding fixed boundary value problem of the hyperbolic-elliptic mixed type by building some powerful estimates for both the first-order hyperbolic equation and a second-order nonlinear elliptic equation in a Lipschitz domain; (2) we update the new free boundary by constructing a mapping that has a fixed point; (3) we establish via the inverse Lagrangian coordinates transformation that the original free interface problem admits a unique piecewise smooth transonic solution near the background state, which consists of a smooth subsonic flow and a smooth supersonic flow with a contact discontinuity.