Stefano Bianchini
S.I.S.S.A., Trieste, ITALY
An important open problem in gas dynamics is to derive the Euler system of conservation laws as the fluidodynamic limit of Bolzmann equation. In general, this problem can be treated as the relaxation limit of a quasilinear system with dissipative sources to some hyperbolic system under a suitable hyperbolic rescaling. We believe that a fundamental step towards these results is to understand the nonlinear wave interactions. In the case of one dimensional hyperbolic systems, this interaction is controlled by the Glimm functional. In this talk, we consider the construction of a Glimm type functional for a certain class of kinetic models. These models provide an approximation to the Boltzmann equation with discrete velocities.