Conditional symmetries for ordinary differential equations and applications

We refine the definition of conditional symmetries of ordinary differential equations and provide an algorithm to compute such symmetries. A proposition is proved which provides criteria as to when the symmetries of the root system of ODEs are inherited by the derived higher-order system. We provide examples and then investigate the conditional symmetry properties of linear nth-order equations subject to root linear second-order equations. First this is considered for simple linear equations and then for arbitrary linear systems. We prove criteria when the symmetries of the root linear ODEs are inherited by the derived scalar linear ODEs and even order linear system of ODEs. Furthermore, we show that if a system of ODEs has exact solutions, then it admits a conditional symmetry subject to the firstorder ODEs related to the invariant curve conditions which arises from the known solution curves. Moreover, we give examples of the conditional symmetries of non-linear third-order equations which are linearizable by second-order Lie linearizable equations. Applications to classical and fluid mechanics are presented. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.