On inverse problems for two-dimensional steady supersonic Euler flows past curved wedges

Abstract We are concerned with the well-posedness of an inverse problem for determining the wedge boundary and associated two-dimensional steady supersonic Euler flow past the wedge, provided that the pressure distribution on the boundary surface of the wedge and the incoming state of the flow in the x –direction are given. We first establish the existence of wedge boundaries and associated entropy solutions of the inverse problem, when the pressure on the wedge boundary is larger than that of the incoming flow but less than a critical value, and the total variation of the incoming flow and the pressure distribution is sufficiently small. This is achieved by a careful construction of suitable approximate solutions and corresponding approximate boundaries via developing a wave-front tracking algorithm and the rigorous proof of their strong convergence subsequentially to a global entropy solution and a wedge boundary, respectively. Then we establish the <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">∞</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> –stability of the wedge boundaries, by introducing a modified Lyapunov functional for two different solutions with two distinct boundaries, each of which may contain a strong shock-front. The modified Lyapunov functional is carefully designed to control the distance between the two boundaries and is proved to be Lipschitz continuous with respect to the differences of the incoming flow and the pressure on the wedge, which leads to the existence of the Lipschitz semigroup as a converging limit of the approximate solutions and boundaries. Finally, when the pressure distribution on the wedge boundary is sufficiently close to that of the incoming flow, using this semigroup, we compare two solutions of the inverse problem in the respective supersonic full Euler flow and potential flow and prove that, at x &gt; 0, the distance between the two boundaries and the difference of the two solutions are of the same order of x multiplied by the cube of the perturbations of the initial boundary data in <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">∞</mml:mi> </mml:msup> <mml:mo>∩</mml:mo> <mml:mi>B</mml:mi> <mml:mi>V</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> .