Global subsonic and subsonic-sonic flows through infinitely long axially symmetric nozzles

In this paper, we establish existence of global subsonic and subsonic-sonic flows through infinitely long axially symmetric nozzles by combining variational method, various elliptic estimates and a compensated compactness method. More precisely, it is shown that there exist global subsonic flows in nozzles for incoming mass flux less than a critical value: moreover, uniformly subsonic flows always approach to uniform flows at far fields when nozzle boundaries tend to be flat at far fields, and flow angles for axially symmetric flows are uniformly bounded away from pi/2; finally, when the incoming mass flux tends to the critical value, subsonic-sonic flows exist globally in nozzles in the weak sense by using angle estimate in conjunction with a compensated compactness framework. (c) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.