Subsonic flows with a contact discontinuity in a finitely long axisymmetric cylinder

This paper concerns the structural stability of subsonic flows with a contact discontinuity in a finitely long axisymmetric cylinder. We establish the existence and uniqueness of axisymmetric subsonic flows with a contact discontinuity by prescribing the horizontal mass flux distribution, the swirl velocity, the entropy and the Bernoulli’s quantity at the entrance and the radial velocity at the exit. It can be formulated as a free boundary problem with the contact discontinuity to be determined simultaneously with the flows. Compared with the two-dimensional case, a new difficulty arises due to the singularity near the axis. An invertible modified Lagrangian transformation is introduced to overcome this difficulty and straighten the contact discontinuity. The key elements in our analysis are to utilize the deformation-curl decomposition introduced in [S. Weng and Z. Xin, A deformation-curl decomposition for three dimensional steady Euler equations, Sci. Sin. Math.49 (2019) 307–320 (in Chinese): doi:10.1360/N012018-00125] to effectively decouple the hyperbolic and elliptic modes in the steady axisymmetric Euler system and to use the implicit function theorem to locate the contact discontinuity.