Front Tracking And Steady Supersonic Potential Flow Past A Curved Wedge

This dissertation studies existence of supersonic isentropic irrotational flow past a two-dimensional wedge. We use a front tracking method to obtain the global weak entropy solution of the problem, under the hypotheses that the total variation of tangent angle along the wedge is sufficiently small. Firstly, we give the estimates on the interactions and reflections of waves and the flows past a corner, then adopt front tracking method to construct approximate solution and obtain global existence of the weak entropy solution. Here, the requirement on the total variation of the edge is to avoid that a large rarefaction or shock is evolved when the potential flow past the wedge surface.