NONLINEAR STABILITY OF VISCOUS SHOCK WAVES FOR ONE-DIMENSIONAL NONISENTROPIC COMPRESSIBLE NAVIER–STOKES EQUATIONS WITH A CLASS OF LARGE INITIAL PERTURBATION

We study the nonlinear stability of viscous shock waves for the Cauchy problem of one-dimensional nonisentropic compressible Navier–Stokes equations for a viscous and heat conducting ideal polytropic gas. The viscous shock waves are shown to be time asymptotically stable under large initial perturbation with no restriction on the range of the adiabatic exponent provided that the strengths of the viscous shock waves are assumed to be sufficiently small.The proofs are based on the nonlinear energy estimates and the crucial step is to obtain the positive lower and upper bounds of the density and the temperature which are uniformly in time and space.