STABILITY OF TRANSONIC JETS WITH STRONG RAREFACTION WAVES FOR TWO-DIMENSIONAL STEADY COMPRESSIBLE EULER SYSTEM

We study supersonic flow past a convex corner which is surrounded by quiescent gas. When the pressure of the upstream supersonic flow is larger than that of the quiescent gas, there appears a strong rarefaction wave to rarefy the supersonic gas. Meanwhile, a transonic characteristic discontinuity appears to separate the supersonic flow behind the rarefaction wave from the static gas. In this paper, we employ a wave front tracking method to establish structural stability of such a flow pattern under non-smooth perturbations of the upcoming supersonic flow. It is an initial-value/free-boundary problem for the two-dimensional steady non-isentropic compressible Euler system. The main ingredients are careful analysis of wave interactions and construction of suitable Glimm functional, to overcome the difficulty that the strong rarefaction wave has a large total variation.