No label defined (Q4389910)

The authors study an interesting approximation method to obtain \(W^{1,p}\) estimates for solutions to a large class of elliptic problems. A general approximation theorem is proved under some approximation property hypothesis, i.e., if the solution \(u\) of \(\text{div} a (x,\nabla u)=0\) belongs to \(W^{1,p}\) then \(u\in W^{1,q}\), where \(q>p\). This result is applied to linear and nonlinear elliptic equations in divergence form; it is shown that their solutions belong to \(W^{1,p}\). A more interesting application of the above stated result is to elliptic homogenization problems for which \(W^{1,p}\) estimates are obtained. The authors illustrate this by a matrix operator \(A(y)\) for which they study uniform \(W^{1,p}\) estimates in two cases: (i) \(A(y)\) continuous and (ii) elliptic transmission problems with \(C^1\) holes or Lipschitz holes in a cube.