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We prove a result of uniqueness of the entropy weak solution to the Cauchy problem for a class of nonlinear hyperbolic systems of conservation laws that includes in particular the p-system of isentropic gas dynamics. Our result concerns weak solutions satisfying the, as we call it, Wave Entropy Condition, or WEC for short, introduced in this paper. The main feature of this condition is that it concerns both shock waves and rarefaction waves present in a solution. For the proof of uniqueness, we derive an existence result (respectively a uniqueness result) for the backward (respectively forward) adjoint problem associated with the nonlinear system. Our method also applies to obtain results of existence or uniqueness for some linear hyperbolic systems with discontinuous coefficients. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

We prove an uniqueness and existence theorem for the entropy weak solution of non-linear hyperbolic conservation laws of the form , with initial data and boundary condition. The scalar function u = u(x, t), x > 0, t > 0, is the unknown; the function f = f(u) is assumed to be strictly convex. We also study the weighted Burgers' equation: α ϵ ℝ . We give an explicit formula, which generalizes a result of Lax. In particular, a free boundary problem for the flux f(u(.,.)) at the boundary is solved by introducing a variational inequality. The uniqueness result is obtained by extending a semigroup property due to Keyfitz.