On the Free Surface Motion of Highly Subsonic Heat-Conducting Inviscid Flows

Abstract

For the free surface problem of highly subsonic heat-conducting inviscid flow in 2-D and 3-D, a priori estimates for geometric quantities of free surfaces, such as the second fundamental form and the injectivity radius of the normal exponential map, and the Sobolev norms of fluid variables, are proved by investigating the coupling of the boundary geometry and the interior solutions. An interesting feature for the free surface problem studied in this paper is the loss of one more derivative than the problem of incompressible Euler equations, for which a geometric approach was introduced by Christodoulou and Lindblad [11]. Due to the loss of the one more derivative and loss of the symmetry of equations which create significant difficulties in closing the estimates in Sobolev spaces of finite regularity, the geometric approach in [11] needs to be substantially developed and extended by exploring the interaction of large variation of temperature, heat-conduction, non-zero divergence of the fluid velocity and the evolution of free surfaces.