Narrow Results

We investigate the existence and properties of traveling wave solutions for the hyperbolic-elliptic system of conservation laws describing the dynamics of van der Waals fluids. The model is based on a constitutive equation of state containing two inflection points and incorporates nonlinear viscosity and capillarity terms. A global description of the traveling wave solutions is provided. We distinguish between classical and non-classical trajectories and, for the latter, the existence and properties of kinetic functions is investigated. An earlier work in this direction (cf. [4]) was restricted to dealing with one inflection point only. Specifically, given any left-hand state and any shock speed (within some admissible range), we prove the existence of a non-classical traveling wave for a sequence of parameter values representing the ratio of viscosity and capillarity. Our analysis exhibits a surprising lack of monotonicity of traveling waves. The behavior of these non-classical trajectories is also investigated numerically.