Well-posedness of transonic characteristic discontinuities in two-dimensional steady compressible Euler flows (Q390333)

In the authors' previous work, they established the existence of transonic characteristic discontinuities separating supersonic flows from a static gas in two-dimensional steady compressible Euler flows under a perturbation with small total variation of the incoming supersonic flow over a solid right wedge. It is a free boundary problem in Eulerian coordinates and, across the free boundary (characteristic discontinuity), the Euler equations are of elliptic-hyperbolic composite-mixed type. In this paper it is proved that transonic characteristic discontinuity solution is unique and \(L^1\)-stable with respect to the small perturbation of the incoming supersonic flow in Lagrangian coordinates. Now the authors are concerned with the well-posedness of transonic characteristic discontinuities that separate supersonic flows from a static gas in two-dimensional steady compressible Euler flows. The governing equations are the following Euler system that consists of conservation laws of mass, momentum, and energy: \[ \begin{aligned} &\partial_x(\rho u)+\partial_y(\rho \upsilon)=0,\\ &\partial_x(\rho u^2+p)+\partial_y(\rho u \upsilon)=0,\\ &\partial_x(\rho u \upsilon)+\partial_y(\rho \upsilon^2+p)=0,\\ &\partial_x(\rho u E+pu)+\partial_y(\rho \upsilon E+p\upsilon)=0,\end{aligned} \] where \(E=\frac{1}{2}(u^2+\upsilon^2)+e\). The unknowns \(\rho\), \(p\), \(e\), and \((u, \upsilon)\) represent the density, pressure, internal energy, and velocity of the fluid, respectively. Specifically, for a polytropic gas, the constitutive relations are \(p=\rho^\gamma\exp(S/c_\nu )\), \(e=\frac{1}{\gamma-1}\frac{p}{\rho}\), where \(S\) is the entropy, \(c_\nu\) is a positive constant, and \(\gamma>1\) is the adiabatic exponent.