Zero relaxation and dissipation limits for hyperbolic conservation laws

We are interested in hyperbolic systems of conservation laws with relaxation and dissipation, particularly the zero relaxation limit. Such a limit is of interest in several physical situations, including gas flow near thermo-equilibrium, kinetic theory with small mean free path, and viscoelasticity with vanishing memory. In this article we study hyperbolic systems of two conservation laws with relaxation. For the stable case where the equilibrium speed is subcharacteristic with respect to the frozen speeds, we illustrate for a model in viscoelasticity that no oscillation develops for the nonlinear system in the zero relaxation limit. For the marginally stable case where the equilibrium speed may equal one of the frozen speeds, we show for a model in phase transitions that no oscillation arises when the dissipation is present and goes to zero more slowly than the relaxation. Our analysis includes the construction of suitable entropy pairs to derive energy estimates. We need such energy estimates not only for the compactness properties but also for the deviation from the equilibrium of the solutions for the relaxation systems. The theory of compensated compactness is then applied to study the oscillation in the zero relaxation limit. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.