A gradient system with a wiggly energy and relaxed EDP-convergence

Abstract

If gradient systems depend on a microstructure, we want to derive a macroscopic gradient structure describing the effective behavior of the microscopic system. We introduce a notion of evolutionary Gamma-convergence that relates the microscopic energy and the microscopic dissipation potential with their macroscopic limits via Gammaconvergence. We call this notion relaxed EDP-convergence since the special structure of the dissipation functional may not be preserved under Gamma-convergence. However, by investigating the kinetic relation we derive the macroscopic dissipation potential.