On the parabolic Stefan problem for Ostwald ripening with kinetic undercooling and inhomogeneous driving force (Q413439)

The parabolic Stefan problem for Ostwald ripening with kinetic undercooling and inhomogeneous driving force is considered. Ostwald ripening is the coarsening phenomenon caused by the diffusion and solidification process which occurs in the last stage of a first-order phase transformation. A quantitative description of Ostwald ripening has been developed by the Lifschitz-Slyozov-Wagner theory. In this paper, the work of \textit{B. Niethammer} [Proc. R. Soc. Edinb., Sect. A, Math. 130, No. 6, 1337--1361 (2000; Zbl 0970.35171)] is extended, which deals with kinetic undercooling in the quasi-static case to the parabolic setting with temporally inhomogeneous driving forces on the solid-liquid interfaces. By means of a priori estimates, local and global existence results for the parabolic Stefan problem, a first order approximation for the dynamical equations for the heat distribution and particle radius are derivated. Then, the convergence to a limiting description using a mean-field equation is proved.