Diminishing functionals for nonclassical entropy solutions selected by kinetic relations (Q604621)

The authors study nonclassical entropy solutions to scalar conservation laws with concave-convex flux functions, whose undercompressive shocks are selected by a kinetic function. Under some natural assumptions on the kinetic function they establish that the generalized total variation of front-tracking approximations is nonincreasing in time, concluding with the existence of nonclassical solutions to the Cauchy problem. The authors also introduce a generalized interaction potential and investigate its monotonicity properties. In particular, it is shown that the interaction potential is non-increasing along a splitting-merging interaction pattern.