A proof of local existence of the problem for supersonic flow past a three-dimensional wing (Q910306)

When a supersonic flow passes a thin wing with a small attack angle, there will appear an attached shock front issued from the head edge of the wing. To determine the place of the shock front and the flow field behind the shock up to the surface of the wing is our main concerned problem. This problem can be formulated mathematically as a boundary value problem of nonlinear hyperbolic system in a domain with wedge shape, whose two boundaries are a fixed characteristic boundary and an unknown noncharacteristic boundary respectively. It is well known that such a problem is very important both theoretically and practically. In the sixties there were some works on the problem for the flow past a wing with the same section. However, in three-dimensional space for wings with various sections the problem becomes much more difficult, because the method of integrating along characteristic curves does not work any more. In recent years there has been much progress in numerical analysis on these problems, but the problem of existence of solutions to such problems still remains open. Now we complete the proof in this article. It is worth mentioning that the theoretical research on hyperbolic system of conservation laws in multidimensional space has made some new progress, which is helpful to our present work.