Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk, we shall study the stability of the Prandtl boundary layer equations in three space variables. First, we obtain a well-posedness result of the three-dimensional Prandtl equations under some constraint on its flow structure. It reveals that the classical Burgers equation plays an important role in determining this type of flow with special structure, that avoids the appearance of the complicated secondary flow in the three-dimensional Prandtl boundary layers. Second, we give an instability criterion for the Prandtl equations in three space variables. Both of linear and nonlinear stability are considered. This criterion shows that the monotonic shear flow is linearly stable for the three dimensional Prandtl equations if and only if the tangential velocity field direction is invariant with respect to the normal variable, which is an exact complement to the above well-posedness result for a special flow. This is a joint work with Chengjie Liu and Tong Yang.