Conservation Laws with Nonlocal Velocity: The Singular Limit Problem

SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Volume 84, Issue 2, Page 497-522, April 2024.
Abstract. We consider conservation laws with nonlocal velocity and show, for nonlocal weights of exponential type, that the unique solutions converge in a weak or strong sense (dependent on the regularity of the velocity) to the entropy solution of the local conservation law when the nonlocal weight approaches a Dirac distribution. To this end, we first establish a uniform total variation bound on the nonlocal velocity, which can be used to pass to the limit in the weak solution. For the required entropy admissibility, we use a tailored entropy-flux pair and take advantage of a well-known result that a single strictly convex entropy-flux pair is sufficient for uniqueness, given some additional constraints on the velocity. For general weights, we show that the monotonicity of the initial datum is preserved over time, which enables us to prove convergence to the local entropy solution for rather general kernels if the initial datum is monotone. This case covers the archetypes of local conservation laws: shock waves and rarefactions. These results suggest that a “nonlocal in the velocity” approximation might be better suited to approximating local conservation laws than a nonlocal in the solution approximation, in which such monotonicity only holds for specific velocities.