MIXED EQUATIONS AND TRANSONIC FLOW

Abstract

This paper reviews the present situation with existence and uniqueness theorems for mixed equations and their application to the problems of transonic flow. Some new problems are introduced and discussed. After a very brief discussion of time-dependent flows (Sec. 1) the steady state and its history is described in Sec. 2. In Secs. 3 and 4, early work on mixed equations and their connection to 2D flow are described and Sec. 5 brings up the problem of shocks, the construction of good airfoils and the relevant boundary value problems. In Sec. 6 we look at what two linear perturbation problems could tell us about the flow. In Sec. 7 we describe other examples of fluid problems giving rise to similar problems. Section 8 is devoted to the uniqueness by a conservation law and Secs. 9–11 to the existence proofs by Friedrichs' multipliers. In Sec. 12 a proof is given of the existence of a steady flow corresponding to some of the previous examples but the equations have been modified to a higher order system with a small parameter which when set to zero yields the equations of transonic flow. It remains to show that this formal limit really holds. Much has been left out especially modern computational results and the text reflects the particular interests of the author.