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The Cauchy Problem for a non Strictly Hyperbolic $3\times3$ System of Conservation Laws Arising in Polymer Flooding

We study the Cauchy problem of a $3\times 3$ system of conservation laws modeling two--phase flow of polymer flooding in rough porous media with possibly discontinuous permeability function. The system loses strict hyperbolicity in some regions of the domain where the eigenvalues of different families coincide, and BV estimates are not available in general. For a suitable $2\times 2$ system, a singular change of variable introduced by Temple could be effective to control the total variation. An extension of this technique can be applied to a $3\times 3$ system only under strict hypotheses on the flux functions. In this paper, through an adapted front tracking algorithm we prove the existence of solutions for the Cauchy problem under mild assumptions on the flux function, using a compensated compactness argument.