Characteristic boundary layers in real vanishing viscosity limits

In this paper, we study the vanishing viscosity limit of initial boundary value problems for one-dimensional mixed hyperbolic–parabolic systems when the boundary is characteristic for both the viscous and the inviscid systems: in particular, we assume that an eigenvalue of the inviscid system vanishes uniformly. We prove the stability of boundary layers expansions in small time (i.e before shocks for the inviscid system) as long as the amplitude of the boundary layers remains sufficiently small. In particular, by using Lagrangian coordinates, we apply our result to physical systems like gasdynamics and magnetohydrodynamics with homogeneous Dirichlet condition for the velocity at the boundary.