Phase‐field systems for multi‐dimensional Prandtl–Ishlinskii operators with non‐polyhedral characteristics (Q4539435)

This paper deals with phase-field models in which hysteresis nonlinearities occur at several places. Here the authors consider operators of the special form \[ \begin{aligned} & f_j[w](t)=\int^\infty_0\varphi_j(r) s_{z_{j,r}}[w](t)dr,\\ & F_j[w](t)=\frac 12\int^\infty_0\varphi_j(r)|s_{z_{j,r}}[w](t)|^2 dr,\end{aligned} \] for \(j=1,2\) and \(t\in [0,T]\), where \(w\) denotes an input function belonging to one of the spaces \(W^{1,1}([0,T],\mathbb{R}^M)\) or \(C([0,T],\mathbb{R}^M)\), and where \(|\cdot|\) denotes the Euclidean length in \(\mathbb{R}^K\), for all \(K\in\mathbb{N}\). For these operators, the corresponding phase-field systems are in the multidimensional case only known to admit unique solutions if the characteristic convex sets defining the operators are polyhedrons. Here the authors use approximation techniques to extend the known results to multidimensional Prandtl-Ishlinskii operators having non-polyhedron convex characteristic sets.