Compacton-like solutions of the hydrodynamic system describing relaxing media (Q1005517)

Solitons are solitary waves which occur as solutions of a certain class of nonlinear dispersive partial differential equations. Compactons are also solitary waves, and they share some common basic features with solitons. Unlike solitons, however, compactons have compact support. In this paper the author studies compacton-like solutions to a hydrodynamic-type model. This model is of dissipative type and therefore is non-Hamiltonian. As a result, compactons exist only for selected values of the parameters. Despite such restrictions, the existence of these solutions is significant because they appear in the presence of relaxing effects and cannot exist in any local hydrodynamic model. Furthermore, these compacton-like solutions exhibit attractive features and can be treated as a certain universal of the energy transfer in media with internal stuructures leading to the given hydrodynamic-type modeling system.