A singular limit problem for conservation laws related to the Camassa-Holm shallow water equation

Abstract. We consider a shallow water equation of Camassa-Holm type, which contains nonlinear dispersive effects as well as fourth order dissipative effects. We prove that as the diffusion and dispersion parameters tend to zero, with a condition on the relative balance between these two parameters, smooth solutions of the shallow water equation converge to discontinuous weak solutions of a scalar conservation law. The proof relies on deriving suitable a priori estimates together with an application of the compensated compactness method in the Lp setting. 1