Subsonic solutions for compressible transonic potential flows

We establish an existence theorem for transonic isentropic potential flows where the subsonic region is bounded by the sonic line and thus the governing equation may become degenerate on the boundary partly or entirely. It has been conjectured by experiments and numerical studies that the self-similar multidimensional flow changes its type, namely, hyperbolic far from the origin (supersonic region) and elliptic near the origin (subsonic region). Furthermore, the potential equation has a different nonlinearity compared to other transonic problems such as the unsteady transonic small disturbance equation, the nonlinear wave equation, and the pressure gradient equation. Namely, the coefficients of the potential equation depend on the gradients while others are independent of the gradients. We provide techniques to handle the gradients, establish interior and boundary gradient estimates for the potential flow in a convex region, and answer the conjecture, that is, the flow is strictly elliptic and the region is subsonic.