Global solutions for a chemotaxis hyperbolic-parabolic system on networks with nonhomogeneous boundary conditions (Q2286209)

In the present work, the author studies a one-dimensional semilinear hyperbolic-parabolic system of the form \[{{u}_{t}}+\lambda {{v}_{x}}=0\] \[{{v}_{t}}+\lambda {{u}_{x}}=u{{\psi }_{x}}-\beta v\] \[{{\psi }_{t}}-D{{\psi }_{xx}}=au-b\psi \] on a finite network, where \(\lambda ,\beta ,D,b>0\) and \(a\ge 0\) are parameters of the model. The proposed system (an adaptation of the so-called Cattaneo equation to the chemotactic case), has been constructed as a model for hemosensitive movements of bacteria or cells, where \(u\) stands for the cells concentration, \(\lambda v\) denotes their average flux and \(\psi \) is the chemo-attractant concentration produced by the cells themselves. This model, complemented with homogeneous boundary conditions at the external vertices of the network, was studied in former two works of the author, concerning the existence and the uniqueness of global solutions in the case of suitably small initial data and some results about existence of stationary solutions and their asymptotic behavior. In the present paper the considered system with the dissipative transmission conditions introduced in the mentioned former works at the inner nodes and nonhomogeneous Neumann conditions for the hyperbolic part and nonhomogeneous Robin condition for the parabolic equation at the external ones. The boundary data are assumed to satisfy suitable hypothesis ensuring, in particular, the boundedness of the total mass of cells during the phenomenon evolution; the mass is preserved in case of homogeneous Neumann conditions, since the conservation of the fluxes holds at each inner nodes, due to the transmission conditions, but in the present case it depends on the evolution in time of the boundary values for the fluxes \(\lambda v\). The first result in the paper is the existence of local solutions, which is achieved by linear contraction semigroups theory together with the abstract theory for semilinear problems, where the dissipative transmission conditions at the inner nodes play a fundamental role. Besides the existence of global solutions is achieved under assumptions of smallness of the data.