No label defined (Q4386476)

In the framework of heat conduction a concentrated heat capacity can be seen as the limit situation of a thermally anisotropic layer whose transversal conductivity tends to infinity, so that the heat conduction problem can be formulated just on a plane. If such a system exchanges heat with the surrounding medium the heat exchange rate will appear as a source term in the conduction problem of reduced dimension. This simple setting becomes much more complicated if the boundary of the concentrated capacity is an \((n-1)\)-dimensional (sufficiently regular) surface. The limit process leads then to a parabolic problem on a surface \(\Gamma\) in which the usual operator \(\text{div}(k\text{ grad})\) is replaced by \(\text{div}_\Gamma(k\text{ grad}_\Gamma)\) where \(\text{div}_\Gamma\), \(\text{grad}_\Gamma\) are suitably defined. This paper is a concise but comprehensive analysis of the problem in which we have the coupling of a phase change process in an ordinary medium, confining with a concentrated capacity also undergoing phase change. This problem presents remarkable difficulties. The paper reviews general methods for establishing existence and uniqueness theorems and also deals with the delicate question of regularity. Relationships with other free boundary problems and open questions are also discussed.