An existence result and evolutionary [Gamma]-convergence for perturbed gradient systems

Abstract

We consider the initial-value problem for the perturbed gradient flows, where a differential inclusion is formulated in terms of a subdifferential of an energy functional, a subdifferential of a dissipation potential and a more general perturbation, which is assumed to be continuous and to satisfy a suitable growth condition. Under additional assumptions on the dissipation potential and the energy functional, existence of strong solutions is shown by proving convergence of a semi-implicit discretization scheme with a variational approximation technique.