Relaxed formulation and existence result of the degenerated elliptic small disturbance model (Q1883452)

The goal of the authors is to consider a steady two-dimensional subsonic-sonic flow of an irrotational compressible fluid in a channel or around a thin airfoil. To attack this problem, an infinite flow is truncated and the density function is modified to be defined only for subsonic-sonic velocities. The original problem is reduced to a variational problem. The main part of the paper is devoted to finding an optimal solution of an associated integral functional. It is no clear physical sense of the solution obtained because the structure of the solution set is not discussed.