A nonlinear parabolic equation with a nonlocal boundary term (Q961537)

A nonlinear parabolic problem of the type \[ \partial_t g(u) -\Delta u =f(u), \;\text{ in } (0,T) \times \Omega \] with a nonlocal boundary condition \[ -\nabla u \cdot \nu =\alpha u + \beta + \int_{\Omega} Ku \;\;\text{on } \Gamma =\partial \Omega \] and an initial condition in \(H^1(\Omega)\) is studied. For the nonlinear term in the equation a monotonically increasing Lipschitz continuity is supposed. The right hand side is a Lipschitz continuous function too and for the boundary functions \(\alpha\), \(\beta\) and \(K\) one has: \(0\leq \alpha\), \(|\alpha'| \leq C\), \(\beta' \in L_2 ((0,T), L_2(\Gamma))\), \(K \in L_2(\Omega)\). Such problems arise in the theory of linear thermoelasticity and were studied in recent years from the theoretical and numerical point of view. The main goal of this paper consists in the existence of a solution of such a problem. The proof is based on Rothe's method. A nonlinear solution in each time step can be achieved iteratively by computing an appropriate sequence of linear relaxation problems. Convergence of the relaxation process is derived. Then stability for the numerical solution in each time step is proved and the existence of a weak solution as a limit of a subsequence of numerical solutions is presented. Finally the advantage of such a very easily implementable algorithm is presented in a numerical example. The uniqueness of the solution is still an open problem.