Bounded positive solutions of nonlinear second-order differential equations (Q2461835)

The author studies the nonlinear differential equation \[ u''+f(t,u,u') = 0 , \quad t>0, \eqno{(1)} \] where \(f: [0,\infty )\times \mathbb R\times\mathbb R\rightarrow\mathbb R\) is a continuous function and proves (as the main result) the following Theorem. Let the function \(f\) satisfy the inequality \[ | f(t,u,u')| \leq F(t,| u| ,| u'| ) , \] where \(F\in C([0,\infty)\times [0,\infty )\times [0,\infty ),[0,\infty ))\), and \(F(t,r,s)\) is nondecreasing with respect to both arguments \(r\) and \(s\) for each \(t\in [0,\infty )\). If the function \(F(t,r,s)\) satisfies the condition \[ \int \limits^{\infty }_{0} \max \{ 1,t\} F(t,2c,c)\,dt < c \] for some \(c>0\), then Eq. (1) has at least one positive solution \(u_{c}\) such that \(u_{c}(t)>0\) for \(t\geq 0\) and \[ \lim _{t\rightarrow \infty } u_{c}(t) = c+\int \limits^{\infty }_{0} sf(s,u(s),u'(s))\,ds. \] For the proof the Schauder-Tychonoff fixed point theorem is used. This theorem contains several known results (as quoted in the References) as special cases. In addition the author applies his result to prove the existence of positive bounded solutions of some classes of semilinear elliptic equations in a two dimensional exterior domain.