Global-in-time solvability of thermodynamically motivated parabolic systems

Abstract

In this paper, doubly non linear parabolic systems in divergence form are investigated form the point of view of their global-in-time weak solvability. The non-linearity under the time derivative is given by the gradient of a strictly convex, globally Lipschitz continuous potential, multiplied by a position-dependent weight. This weight admits singular values. The flux under the spatial divergence is also of monotone gradient type, but it is not restricted to polynomial growth. It is assumed that the elliptic operator generates some equi-coercivity on the spatial derivatives of the unknowns. The paper introduces some original techniques to deal with the case of nonlinear purely Neumann boundary conditions. In this respect, it generalises or complements the results by Alt and Luckhaus (1983) and Alt (2012). A field of application of the theory are the multi species diffusion systems driven by entropy.