A well-posedness result for irreversible phase transitions with a nonlinear heat flux law (Q1942773)

The paper deals with the existence and uniqueness of a weak solution for the Cauchy-Neumann problem to the system of PDEs constituted by \[ \partial_t\theta+\theta\partial_t\chi-\nabla\cdot(k\nabla\theta)=(\partial_t\chi)^2, \] and the phase equation \[ \partial_t\chi-\Delta\chi+\xi+\chi^3-\chi=\theta, \] under the constraint \[ \xi\in\alpha(\partial_t\chi) \] in \(\Omega\times]0,T[\), where \(\alpha\) is a maximal monotone operator, and \(\Omega\) is a smooth bounded three-dimensional domain. For a \(C^1\) (thermal conductivity) function \(k\) satisfying a \(p\)-growth condition, the existence of the triple \((\theta,\chi,\xi)\) is obtained by an approximation procedure, which consists in regularizing \(\alpha\), and inserting vanishing inertial and viscosity contributions in the phase equation. ``The existence of a global solution to the approximating problem is obtained by a fixed point scheme combined with a prolongation argument, based on global-in-time a priori estimates. The passage to the limit exploits compactness and monotonicity techniques, while the uniqueness result follows from suitable contraction estimates.''