Instability results for transonic flows past airfoils

Abstract

In this short note we present an instability result for transonic flows with respect to perturbations of the Mach number at infinity. More specifically we show that a perturbation of a transonic solution in the context of a Cauchy problem for the 2-dimensional steady, isentropic and irrotational Euler equations, which is a solution that solves an elliptic equation in certain parts of its domain and a hyperbolic equation in other parts, can only take place in the analytic category if the elliptic part of the domain is affected.