Asymptotic behavior of solutions to a system of viscous conservation laws related to a phase transition problem

We study the asymptotic behavior of solutions for a system of viscous conservation laws with discontinuous initial data. We discuss mainly the case where the system without the viscosity term is of hyperbolic elliptic mixed type. This problem is related to a phase transition problem. We study the initial value problem and show the decay rates of solutions to piecewise constant states where two phases coexist. The modification necessary for the hyperbolic case is also discussed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.