Persistence of the steady planar normal shock structure in 3-D unsteady potential flows

This paper concerns the dynamic stability of the steady three-dimensional (3-D) wave structure of a planar normal shock front intersecting perpendicularly to a planar solid wall for unsteady potential flows. The stability problem can be formulated as a free boundary problem of a quasi-linear hyperbolic equation of second order in a dihedral-space domain between the shock front and the solid wall. The key difficulty is brought by the edge singularity of the space domain, the intersection curve between the shock front and the solid wall. Different from the two-dimensional (2-D) case, for which the singular part of the boundary is only a point, it is a curve for the 3-D case in this paper. This difference brings new difficulties to the mathematical analysis of the stability problem. A modified partial hodograph transformation is introduced such that the extension technique developed for the 2-D case can be employed to establish the well-posed theory for the initial-boundary value problem of the linearized hyperbolic equation of second order in a dihedral-space domain. Moreover, the extension technique is improved in this paper such that loss of regularity in the a priori estimates on the shock front does not occur. Thus, the classical nonlinear iteration scheme can be constructed to prove the existence of the solution to the stability problem, which shows the dynamic stability of the steady planar normal shock without applying the Nash–Moser iteration method. © 2023 The Authors. The publishing rights in this article are licensed to the London Mathematical Society under an exclusive licence.