Renormalized solutions for a class of nonlinear evolution problems (Q1128296)

The authors study a class of nonlinear parabolic differential equations of the form \[ \frac {\partial b(u)}{\partial t} - \text{div}[ADu + \phi(u)] +f \] in a cylindrical domain \(\Omega \times (0,T)\) with zero Dirichlet data on the lateral boundary and given initial data. Here, \(b\) is a strictly increasing function which maps an open interval of \(\mathbb R\) onto \(\mathbb R\), \(A\) is a bounded, symmetric, uniformly positive-definite matrix, \(\phi\) is a continuous function defined on all of \(\mathbb R\), and \(f\) is integrable. If growth conditions are placed on \(\phi\), and if \(f\) and \(b\) are sufficiently smooth, then a solution can be found via essentially classical methods. The important element in the present paper is the weak hypotheses on these functions. The precise definition of renormalized solution is too complicated to reproduce here, but the basic idea of the definition can be described as follows. Given a function \(S\in C^\infty_0(\mathbb R)\), multiply the differential equation by \(S(b(u))\) and rewrite the resulting equation in divergence form; a renormalized solution needs to satisfy this new equation for any such function \(S\). In addition the truncations of \(u\) should all lie in \(L^2\). The proof consists of, first, studying a sequence of approximating problems and, next, proving some a priori estimates which show that the solutions of the approximating problems converge to a renormalized solution of the original problem.