The isothermal Euler equations for ideal gas with source term: product solutions, flow reversal and no blow up (Q2627968)

The authors study the one-dimensional isothermal Euler equations with source terms used as a model of gas flow through a pipe. They construct big solutions of that system which are global in time which might seem unexpected for such a system of hyperbolic balance laws. Here, ``big'' means that the initial data can have an arbitrarily large \(C^1\) norm of the logarithmic derivative. The proof is based upon the explicit construction of product solutions. They obtain solutions with the density and the flow rate increasing in time as well as those with the direction of gas flow changing. The interest in such solutions is related to e.g. the validation of numerical algorithms used to compute flows in pipelines.