Existence of solutions and separation from singularities for a class of fourth order degenerate parabolic equations (Q2846984)

The paper is devoted to the analysis of one class of fourth-order parabolic equations which arise in problems connected with thin liquid films (in 2 d). Furthermore, the studied equations can be considered as a variant of the Cahn-Hilliard model with degenerate mobility and singular potentials (in 3 d). The central result in this article is the existence proof of weak solutions which relies on a regularization, a priori estimates and passage to the limit. In the core of the existence proof are energy and entropy bounds that characterize the evolutionary process. Although the authors use mentioned standard techniques, they address problems under a different perspective, and that makes their results interesting and different from other results known in the literature. More precisely, in this paper the authors are mostly interested in analyzing the long-time behaviour of solutions from the point of view of infinite-dimensional dynamical systems, trying to determine the existence of a global attractor. After proving the main existence result, the authors show the existence of weak trajectory attractors. Moreover, in the viscous case they prove the existence of a strong trajectory attractor by applying the so-called energy method. Finally, under some restrictive conditions the strict positivity of solutions in the viscous case is proved.