Stability of admissible solutions for coexisting phase transitions for one-dimensional compressible van der Waals fluids

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic stability of certain steady-state solutions to the periodic boundary value problem for compressible isentropic Navier-Stokes system under the van der Waals equation of state in one space dimension. These steady-state solutions correspond to the admissible solutions describing two-phase coexisting phase transitions, where the integral average of the specific volume belongs to the Maxwell region. We first construct a semi-discrete staggered grid difference scheme to prove the local existence of solutions to the periodic problem, without imposing the standard stability hypothesis \(p_v<0\). Then, by virtue of rigorous piecewise a priori estimates, we demonstrate that the periodic boundary value problem for van der Waals fluids possesses a global solution existing for all time, and this solution converges uniformly to the admissible steady state as time tends to infinity. This result firmly establishes the nonlinear stability of the admissible phase-transition solutions under general small initial disturbances.