Shock diffraction by convex cornered wedges for the nonlinear wave system (Q2436323)

The authors discuss a boundary value problem for second-order nonlinear partial differential equations of mixed elliptic-hyperbolic type in an unbounded domain, which describes a shock diffraction by two-dimensional convex cornered wedges in compressible fluid flow. This problem can be further reformulated as a free boundary problem for nonlinear degenerate elliptic equations of second order with a degenerate oblique derivative boundary condition. A global theory of existence and optimal regularity for this shock diffraction problem is established by 1) regularizing the equation by adding the regularized differential operator \(\epsilon \Delta\) to make the equation uniformly elliptic 2) using the Perron method to show the global existence of solutions for the fixed boundary value problem 3) applying the Schauder fixed point theorem to show the existence of global solutions for the free boundary problem. Uniform estimates for the global solutions with respect to \(\delta, \epsilon>0\) are obtained.