Stability of contact discontinuities to 1-D piston problem for the compressible Euler equations

Abstract

We consider 1-D piston problem for the compressible Euler equations when the piston is static relatively to the gas in the tube. By a modified wave front tracking method, we prove that a contact discontinuity is structurally stable under the assumptions that the total variation of the initial data and the perturbation of the piston velocity are both sufficiently small. Meanwhile, we study the asymptotic behavior of the solutions by the generalized characteristic method and approximate conservation law theory as t→+∞.