Remarks on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation

We report here a joint work in progress on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. The question we address is the analytical study of a fourth order nonlinear evolution equation. This equation has been obtained by Sivashinsky in the context of combustion and independently by Kuramoto in the context of reaction diffusion-systems. Both were motivated by (nonlinear) stability of travelling waves. Numerical calculations have been done on this equation. All the results seem to indicate a chaotic behavior of the solution. Therefore, the analytical study is of interest in analogy with the Burger's and Navier-Stokes equations. Here we give some existence and uniqueness results for the equation in space dimension one, and we also study a fractional step method of numerical resolution. In a forthcoming joint paper with R. Temam, we will study the asymptotic behavior, as t approaches infinity, of the solution of (0.1) and give an estimate on the number of determining modes.