Abstract: Stability of liquid-gas coexistence equilibrium in a relaxation model for isothermal phase transition in a sealed one-dimensional tube was discussed. With matched asymptotic expansion, a linear system for first order perturbations was derived formally. By solving this system analytically, it is shown that small initial perturbations are damped out in general; yet they may maintain at certain level for special cases. Numerical evidence is presented. This manifests the regularization effects of relaxation.

Key words: phase transition, relaxation, matched asymptotic expansion