Flux-saturated porous media equations and applications (Q2352771)

In this survey paper, the authors review results concerning nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations where two diffusion mechanisms are combined, namely a flux-saturation mechanism and a porous media type diffusion. In the first part (Sections 1--3), the authors introduce the latter two mechanisms, describe different methods to derive flux-saturated models without or with the porous medium mechanism, and present numerical simulations which illustrate some phenomena of these models and the corresponding analytical difficulties. The second part (Sections 4--7) is devoted to the well-posedness for some model classes. In particular, the theory of entropy solutions for the Cauchy problem is presented for different regularity assumptions on the flux, but also some alternative approaches and a generalization to reaction-diffusion equations with flux-saturation are described. In the third part (Sections 8--12), different aspects of the qualitative behavior of solutions are reviewed, namely Rankine-Hugoniot conditions, the property of finite speed of propagation, the regularity of solutions, waiting time phenomena, and the convergence of solutions of flux-saturated models to solutions of porous media equations. Finally, some aspects of the fast diffusion range are discussed. The fourth part (Section 13) contains the classification of traveling wave solutions with monotone decreasing wave profile for a flux-saturated reaction-diffusion equation with a reaction term of Fisher-KPP type. In addition, detailed proofs are presented for the results of this section. In the final part (Section 14), the authors describe a biological application in morphogenesis.