Existence of nonlinear boundary layer to the Boltzmann equation with reverse reflection boundary condition Original Research Article

Many physical models have boundaries. When the Boltzmann equation is used to study a physical problem with boundary, there usually exists a layer of width of the order of the Knudsen number along the boundary. Hence, the research on the boundary layer problem is important both in mathematics and physics. Based on the previous work, in this paper, we consider the existence of boundary layer solution to the Boltzmann equation for hard sphere model with positive Mach number. The boundary condition is imposed on incoming particles of reverse reflection type, and the solution is assumed to approach to a global Maxwellian in the far field. Similar to the problem with Dirichlet boundary condition studied in [S. Ukai, T. Yang, S.H. Yu, Nonlinear boundary layers of the Boltzmann equation: I. Existence, Comm. Math. Phys. 3 (2003) 373–393], the existence of a solution is shown to depend on the Mach number of the far field Maxwellian. Moreover, there is an implicit solvability condition on the boundary data. According to the solvability condition, the co-dimension of the boundary data related to the number of the positive characteristic speeds is obtained.