On the chain rule formulas for divergences and applications to conservation laws

Abstract

In this paper we prove a nonautonomous chain rule formula for the distributional divergence of the composite function $\boldsymbol{v}(x)=\boldsymbol{B}(x,u(x))$, where $\boldsymbol{B}(\cdot,t)$ is a divergence--measure vector field and $u$ is a function of bounded variation. As an application, we prove a uniqueness result for scalar conservation laws with discontinuous flux.