Boundedness of solutions to quasilinear parabolic equations (Q329249)

The authors prove boundedness properties of the weak solutions to the quasilinear parabolic problem \(u_{t}-\mathrm{div}(a(x,t,u,Du))=b(x,t,u,Du)\) posed in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\) with the homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition \(u=0\) on \(\partial \Omega \times (0,T)\) and the initial condition \( u=u_{0}\in L^{2}(\Omega )\) in \(\Omega \times \{0\}\). Here \(\Omega \) is a bounded domain of \(\mathbb{R}^{n}\), \(n\geq 2\). The nonlinear terms \(a\) and \(b \) are supposed to satisfy sub-controlled growth properties \(\left| a(x,t,z,\xi )\right| \leq \Lambda (\varphi (x,t)+\left| z\right| ^{\frac{\ell (m-1)}{m}}+\left| \xi \right| ^{m-1})\), \(\left| b(x,t,z,\xi )\right| \leq \Lambda (\psi (x,t)+\left| z\right| ^{\ell -1}+\left| \xi \right| ^{\frac{m(\ell -1)}{\ell }})\), with \( \frac{m(n+2)}{n+m}<\ell <\frac{m(n+2)}{n}\), \(m>\frac{2n}{n+2}\) and a coercivity property \(a(x,t,z,\xi )\cdot \xi \geq \gamma \left| \xi \right| ^{m}-\Lambda \left| \xi \right| ^{\ell }-\Lambda \varphi ^{\frac{m}{m-1}}(x,t)\). Here \(\varphi \) (resp. \(\psi \)) is a nonnegative function in the space \(L^{q_{1}}(0,T;L^{p_{1},\lambda _{1}}(\Omega ))\) (resp. \(L^{q_{2}}(0,T;L^{p_{2},\lambda _{2}}(\Omega ))\)) with hypotheses on the parameters \(q_{i},p_{i},\lambda _{i}\) in terms of \(n\) and \(m\). The authors first define the notion of weak solution in this context, introducing a variational formulation of the Cauchy-Dirichlet problem. The main result proves that every weak solution to this Cauchy-Dirichlet problem is essentially bounded in \(\Omega \times (\sigma T,T)\) for some \(\sigma \in (0,1)\). Moreover if \(u_{0}\) is essentially bounded in \(\Omega \) the weak solution is globally essentially bounded in \(\Omega \times (0,T)\). For the proof, the authors estimate the integral \(\int_{t_{1}}^{t_{2}}\int_{\Omega }v^{s_{0}}\phi dxdt\) with \(v\in L^{\infty }(0,T;L^{2}(\Omega ))\cap L^{m}(0,T;W_{0}^{1,m}(\Omega ))\) and \(\phi \in L^{q}(0,T;L^{p,\lambda }(\Omega ))\) for appropriate values of the different parameters in terms of the Dirichlet energy of \(v\) in the same time strip \(\Omega \times (t_{1},t_{2})\). This requires an Adams trace inequality for functions in \( W_{0}^{1,r}(\Omega )\). The authors also use the De Giorgi approach in order to get boundedness properties, extending the results of \textit{O. A. Ladyzhenskaya} et al. [Линейные и квазилинейные уравнения параболического типа (Russian). Moskva: Izdat `Nauka' (1967; Zbl 0164.12302)].