On a certain class of nonuniformly elliptic equations (Q1921829)

The article is devoted to obtaining a priori estimates and proving an existence theorem for the Dirichlet problem in a rectangular parallelepiped for some class of nonuniformly elliptic quasilinear equations: \[ a(x, y, u, \nabla u) u_{xx}+ 2b(x, y, u, \nabla u) u_{xy}+ c(x, y, u, \nabla u) u_{yy}= f(x, y, u, \nabla u). \] The primary question consists in obtaining an a priori estimate for \(\sup|\nabla u|\). Usually, for both nonuniformly and uniformly elliptic equations, proving a global estimate for \(|\nabla u|\) splits into obtaining an estimate for \(|\nabla u|\) on the boundary of the domain and subsequently obtaining an estimate on the whole domain by using differentiation and the maximum principle. In the present article, for some class of nonuniformly elliptic equations, we obtain estimates for \(|\nabla u|\) without differentiation and at once on the whole domain (i.e., without a preliminary boundary estimate); moreover, the constant, independent of the ellipticity coefficient and the smoothness of the coefficients of the equation, is found explicitly. Furthermore, in \S 2 we give a sufficient condition for boundedness of a solution to the Dirichlet problem for an arbitrary quasilinear elliptic equation.