The time-periodic unfolding operator and applications to parabolic homogenization (Q1687600)

The authors define a time-periodic unfolding operator that they use to describe the asymptotic behavior of the solution of a parabolic equation with periodic coefficients with respect to time and space. Let \(\Omega \) be a bounded and connected subset of \(\mathbb{R}^{N}\) with Lipschitz boundary \( \partial \Omega \) and \(Y=(0,1)^{N}\). They consider the equation \(a_{1}^{\tau }a_{2}^{\tau }\frac{\partial u_{\tau }}{\partial t}-div(A^{\tau }\nabla u_{\tau })=f\) in \(\Omega _{T}=\Omega \times (0,T)\), with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions on \(\partial \Omega \times (0,T)\), the solution starting from an initial condition \(u_{0}^{\tau }\) satisfying \( u_{0}^{\tau }\rightarrow u_{0}\) strongly in \(L^{2}(\Omega )\) and \(\left\| u_{0}^{\tau }\right\| _{W^{1,2}(\Omega )}\leq C/\sqrt{\tau }\). The coefficients \(a_{1}^{\tau }\) and \(a_{2}^{\tau }\) are defined through \( a_{1}^{\tau }(x,t)=a_{1}(x,t,\frac{x}{\varepsilon })\) and \(a_{2}^{\tau }(x,t)=a_{2}(x,t,\frac{t}{\varepsilon })\) where \(a_{1}:\Omega _{T}\times Y\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) and \(a_{2}:\Omega _{T}\times (0,1)\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) are measurable, positive and bounded functions which are Lipschitz continuous with respect to their time or space variables. The \( N\times N\) matrix \(A^{\tau }\) is defined through \(A^{\tau }(x,t)=\mathcal{A} ^{\tau }(t,\frac{x}{\varepsilon },\frac{t}{\varepsilon })\) where \(\mathcal{A} ^{\tau }\) satisfies uniform continuity and coercivity properties. Some derivatives of \(a_{1}\), \(a_{2}\) and \(\mathcal{A}^{\tau }\) are supposed to be bounded. The authors first prove uniform estimates on the solution to this parabolic problem. To describe the asymptotic behavior of this solution, they introduce the time-periodic unfolding operator \(\mathcal{T}_{\tau }(w)(x,y,t,s)=w(\varepsilon [ \frac{x}{\varepsilon }]_{Y}+\varepsilon y,\tau [ \frac{t}{\tau }]+\tau s)\) for every measurable function \(w\) and they consider three cases \(\lim_{\tau ,\varepsilon \rightarrow 0}\frac{ \tau }{\varepsilon ^{2}}=l\in (0,+\infty )\), \(\lim_{\tau ,\varepsilon \rightarrow 0}\frac{\varepsilon ^{2}}{\tau }=0\) and \(\lim_{\tau ,\varepsilon \rightarrow 0}\frac{\tau }{\varepsilon }=l\in (0,+\infty )\) for the time and space periods. In each case, the authors first establish weak convergences for \(u_{\tau }\), \(\mathcal{T}_{\tau }(u_{\tau })\), and \(\mathcal{T}_{\tau }(\nabla u_{\tau })\). They build the variational formulation for the limit problem. In the final part of the paper, the authors establish the homogenized parabolic equation associated to these variational formulations.