2019, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Sprekels, Jürgen

In this paper, we study a system of three evolutionary operator equations involving fractional powers of selfadjoint, monotone, unbounded, linear operators having compact resolvents. This system constitutes a generalized and relaxed version of a phase field system of Cahn--Hilliard type modelling tumor growth that has originally been proposed in Hawkins-Daarud et al. (Int. J. Numer. Math. Biomed. Eng. 28 (2012), 3--24). The original phase field system and certain relaxed versions thereof have been studied in recent papers co-authored by the present authors and E. Rocca. The model consists of a Cahn--Hilliard equation for the tumor cell fraction φ, coupled to a reaction-diffusion equation for a function S representing the nutrient-rich extracellular water volume fraction. Effects due to fluid motion are neglected. Motivated by the possibility that the diffusional regimes governing the evolution of the different constituents of the model may be of different (e.g., fractional) type, the present authors studied in a recent note a generalization of the systems investigated in the abovementioned works. Under rather general assumptions, well-posedness and regularity results have been shown. In particular, by writing the equation governing the evolution of the chemical potential in the form of a general variational inequality, also singular or nonsmooth contributions of logarithmic or of double obstacle type to the energy density could be admitted. In this note, we perform an asymptotic analysis of the governing system as two (small) relaxation parameters approach zero separately and simultaneously. Corresponding well-posedness and regularity results are established for the respective cases; in particular, we give a detailed discussion which assumptions on the admissible nonlinearities have to be postulated in each of the occurring cases.

2020, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Sprekels, Jürgen

In a recent paper the same authors have proved existence, uniqueness and regularity results for a class of viscous and nonviscous Cahn--Hilliard systems of two operator equations in which nonlinearities of double-well type, like regular or logarithmic potentials, as well as nonsmooth potentials with indicator functions, were admitted. The operators appearing in the system equations are fractional powers in the spectral sense of general linear operators, which are densely defined, unbounded, selfadjoint, and monotone in the Hilbert space of square-integrable functions on a bounded and smooth three-dimensional domain, and have compact resolvents. Here, for the case of the viscous system, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of the solution as the fractional power coefficient of the second operator tends to zero. We prove convergence to a phase relaxation problem at the limit, and we also investigate this limiting problem, in which an additional term containing the projection of the phase variable on the kernel of the second operator appears.

2015, Colli, Pierluigi, Gilardi, Gianni, Rocca, Elisabetta, Sprekels, Jürgen

In this paper we perform an asymptotic analysis for two different vanishing viscosity coefficients occurring in a phase field system of Cahn--Hilliard type that was recently introduced in order to approximate a tumor growth model. In particular, we extend some recent results obtained in [Colli-Gilardi-Hilhorst 2015], letting the two positive viscosity parameters tend to zero independently from each other and weakening the conditions on the initial data in such a way as to maintain the nonlinearities of the PDE system as general as possible. Finally, under proper growth conditions on the interaction potential, we prove an error estimate leading also to the uniqueness result for the limit system.