Large-time behavior of global solutions to the Cauchy problem of one-dimensional viscous and heat-conducting ionized gas

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the Cauchy problem of one-dimensional viscous and heat-conducting ionized gas when the viscosity is a positive constant or depends on the density. According to Saha's ionization equation, the equations of state for the basic thermodynamic variables of an ionized gas depend also on the degree of ionization, which leads to the loss of concavity of the physical entropy in some small bounded domain. Such a property of the ionized gas together with the unboundedness of the domain under our consideration makes it hard to derive the desired dissipative estimates on the first-order spatial derivative of both the bulk velocity and the absolute temperature, thus making the problem more challenging.In this paper, for a class of constant non-vacuum equilibrium states with positive temperature, we succeed in deducing the desired uniform-in-time bounds on the above mentioned dissipative estimates on both the bulk velocity and the absolute temperature. Based on such an estimate, we can then establish the global existence of solutions to the Cauchy problem of one-dimensional viscous and heat-conducting ionized gas with positive constant or density-dependent viscosity and show that such a class of constant non-vacuum equilibrium states is time asymptotically nonlinear stable.