Abstract : We are concerned with the well-posedness of a model of granular flow that consists of a hyperbolic system of two balance laws in one-space dimension, which is linearly degenerate along two straight lines in the phase plane and genuinely nonlinear in the subdomains confined by such lines. After introducing the problem, I discuss recent results on the Lipschitz L1-continuous dependence of the entropy weak solutions on the initial data, with a Lipschitz constant that grows exponentially in time. Our analysis relies on the extension of a Lyapunov like functional and provides the first construction of a Lipschitz semigroup of entropy weak solutions to the regime of hyperbolic systems of balance laws (i) with characteristic families that are neither genuinely nonlinear nor linearly degenerate and (ii) initial data of arbitrarily large total variation.

Keywords : balance laws; global large BV; granular flow; $L^{1}$-stability; weakly linearly; degenerate system