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    Asymptotic analysis of a tumor growth model with fractional operators
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 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.
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    Self-consistent field theory for a polymer brush. Part II: The effective chemical potential
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Münch, Andreas; Wagner, Barbara
    The most successful mean-field model to describe the collective behaviour of the large class of macromolecular polymers is the self-consistent field theory (SCFT). Still, even for the simple system of a grafted dry polymer brush, the mean-field equations have to be solved numerically. As one of very few alternatives that offer some analytical tractability the strong-stretching theory (SST) has led to explicit expressions for the effective chemical potential and consequently the free energy to promote an understanding of the underlying physics. Yet, a direct derivation of these analytical results from the SCFT model is still outstanding. In this study we present a systematic asymptotic theory based on matched asymtptotic expansions to obtain the effective chemical potential from the SCFT model for a dry polymer brush for large but finite stretching.
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    Self-consistent field theory for a polymer brush. Part I: Asymptotic analysis in the strong-stretching limit
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Münch, Andreas; Wagner, Barbara
    In this study we consider the self-consistent field theory for a dry, in- compressible polymer brush, densely grafted on a substrate, describing the average segment density of a polymer in terms of an effective chemical potential for the interaction between the segments of the polymer chain. We present a systematic singular perturbation analysis of the self-consistent field theory in the strong-stretching limit, when the length scale of the ratio of the radius of gyration of the polymer chain to the extension of the brush from the substrate vanishes. Our analysis yields, for the first time, an approximation for the average segment density that is correct to leading order in the outer scaling and resolves the boundary layer singularity at the end of the polymer brush in the strong-stretching limit. We also show that in this limit our analytical results agree increasingly well with our numerical solutions to the full model equations comprising the self-consistent field theory.
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    An asymptotic analysis for a generalized Cahn--Hilliard system with fractional operators
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 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.