Time-weighted estimates for the Blackstock equation in nonlinear ultrasonics

Abstract

High frequencies at which ultrasonic waves travel give rise to nonlinear phenomena. In thermoviscous fluids, these are captured by Blackstock’s acoustic wave equation with strong damping. We revisit in this work its well-posedness analysis. By exploiting the parabolic-like character of this equation due to strong dissipation, we construct a time-weighted energy framework for investigating its local solvability. In this manner, we obtain the small-data well-posedness on bounded domains under less restrictive regularity assumptions on the initial conditions compared to the known results. Furthermore, we prove that such initial boundary-value problems for the Blackstock equation are globally solvable and that their solution decays exponentially fast to the steady state.